Tag Archives: obesity

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2015 ISBN: 978-0-19-965665-3 Price: £115 (print), £29 (online, 1-year subscription) It is widely accepted knowledge among health professionals and the general public that premature cardiovascular disease can be prevented. However the evidence and guidelines on prevention are typically scattered, making integration into clinical practice problematic. The ESC textbook of preventive cardiology aims to collate all the aspects of prevention into one textbook. While the title may give the initial impression that the editors are going to be providing the old rhetoric on hypertension, smoking and lipid control,

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has said that thousands of people with atrial fibrillation (AF) could be prevented from having strokes, disability or death if its new guidance is followed. It says many patients with AF are not being appropriately anticoagulated and highlights how there has not been widespread uptake of novel oral anticoagulant drugs (NOACs) which were approved by NICE in 2012. Clinical guideline 180 published in June 2014 updates and replaces the 2006 NICE clinical guideline 36. The full guidance can be found at http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG180 NICE Chair, Professor David Haslam writes on the

BSH Parliament day Professor Andrew Clark (President of the British Society for Heart Failure) is pictured here (centre) carrying out an echocardiogram in the House of Commons. He was at a BSH event to help raise awareness that a person diagnosed with heart failure is likely to have a worse prognosis than if they were diagnosed with most cancers. This is despite the availability of specialist heart failure services that can have a remarkable impact on a patient’s chance of survival, but for which there is inconsistent access over the UK leading to wide variations in care and outcomes. Over 60 MPs, Peers, and professional and patient groups

HEAT-PPCI: heparin outperforms bivalirudin in primary PCI The major talking point of this year’s American College of Cardiology meeting was without doubt the aptly named HEAT-PPCI trial which generated more heat than has been seen at such conferences for quite some time. The trial acronym stands for How Effective Are Antithrombotic Therapies in Primary PCI (percutaneous coronary intervention), and the study – conducted in the UK under the leadership of Dr Rod Stables (Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital) – compared unfractionated heparin with bivalirudin (Angiomax®, the Medicines Company) in patients with ST-elevation myoca

“It’s no coincidence that we’re publishing the series at a time when the country and much of the world is gripped with Olympic fever,” stated Dr Pamela Das, executive editor of the Lancet, at a press conference. One paper reported that 9.4% of deaths from any cause are attributable to physical inactivity. Although the host nation of the Olympics, the UK came out particularly badly in the research. In terms of coronary heart disease, lack of exercise was said to account for 5.8% of cases worldwide, but this rises to 10.5% in the UK. If everyone were to engage in just a modest level of physical activity, this would translate into a gain

EVINCI study completed The prevalence of “significant” coronary artery disease in patients with chest pain symptoms is lower than expected in Europe, according to preliminary findings from the The EValuation of INtegrated Cardiac Imaging (EVINCI) study. Once the final analysis is completed, the EVINCI study is expected to demonstrate that performing adequate non-invasive imaging screening of patients with suspected coronary artery disease could safely avoid invasive procedures in 75 out of 100 patients.  The study will have sufficient power to answer the question of which is the most cost-effective non-invasive imaging strategy for the j

ARBITER 6: niacin superior to ezetimibe for slowing atherosclerosis Use of extended-release niacin resulted in a significant benefit on atherosclerosis compared with ezetimibe in patients already taking statins in the ARBITER 6-HALTS trial. The trial, presented at the meeting by Dr Allen Taylor (Medstar Research Institute, Washington DC, US), compared two distinct lipid-modifying strategies in patients with known vascular disease already on statins who had LDL-cholesterol levels <100 mg/dL (2.56 mmol/L) and moderately low HDL-cholesterol levels (<50 mg/dL [1.28 mmol/L]). Among the 363 patients enrolled in the study, half were randomised

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