Journal and News Scan

Patient Care and General Interest

Screening infants for critical congenital heart disease at birth is becoming mandatory in the US state of Idaho and the Indian state of Kerala.

Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, has completed its 500^th heart transplant.

Drugs and Devices

The Venus P-Valve self-expanding pulmonary valve from Venus Medtech has been launched in Canada. The valve was developed for percutaneous implantation in native right ventricular outflow tracts.

The US Food and Drug Administration has issued a Class I recall for the HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device from Medtronic due to the possibility of an interrupted connection between the power source and the device controller.

Research, Trials, and Funding

A cardiac surgery team in Japan has approval to test induced pluripotent stem cell grafts in patients with damaged heart tissue to determine the safety of this regenerative medicine approach.

Interim data from a phase II trial from Leading BioSciences suggests that the company’s serine protease inhibitor, which targets postoperative ileus, reduces the length of intensive care and hospital stay for patients undergoing cardiac procedures on cardiopulmonary bypass.

An analysis from a European registry determined that mortality prediction models for heart failure patients have relatively poor reliability and are not used often in clinical practice.

Chen and colleagues present their experience closing ventricular septal defects with a device using a minimally invasive surgical approach that does not require cardiopulmonary bypass. This approach relies on transthoracic echocardiography for device guidance and was substantially cheaper than transcatheter approaches. The authors conclude that intraoperative device closure of ventricular septal defects is a reasonable alternative to transcatheter approaches, particularly in developing countries.

Patient Care and General Interest

Cardiac arrest survivors gathered at Basildon Hospital in the UK to share their stories and raise awareness, while attempting to set a world record for most cardiac arrest survivors at one gathering.

The University of Washington in the US joins a growing list of institutions that offer hearts from hepatitis C-positive donors to patients on the transplant waiting list, as evidence accumulates that the virus can be safely treated in organ recipients.

Drugs and Devices

Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has approved the Perceval sutureless valve from LivaNova for treating aortic valve disease.

Research, Trials, and Funding

Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles in the US and from Edwards Lifesciences trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict intraoperative hypotension using physiological data that is routinely collected during surgery.

Swedish researchers have found an association between invasive procedures such as coronary artery bypass grafting and infective endocarditis, and the accompanying editorial postulated that improving sterile technique and procedures for infection control when possible may prove more beneficial than administering prophylactic antibiotics.

Research presented at the recent American Thoracic Society meeting in San Diego, California, evaluated patient refusal of lung cancer treatment, finding that US patients with early stage disease were more likely to refuse surgical treatment if they did not have insurance or if they were covered by Medicaid.

Antonides and colleagues present fundamental concepts of cost–effectiveness analysis (CEA) and they discuss the interpretation of these analyses. CEAs of new treatment strategies are being increasingly reported in the literature and national reports, and governments and healthcare payers frequently require a CEA to aid in the decision of whether to fund a new treatment or not. The authors consider a real-world example CEA, comparing transcatheter to surgical aortic valve replacement for intermediate-risk patients.