Journal and News Scan

This is an instructive editorial that reminds us of the challenges women face in CT surgery.  It describes how to go beyond the social online movement to achieve practical changes in training, hiring, and mentoring.

Patient Care and General Interest

A congenital heart surgeon in Boston, Massachusetts, was once a patient himself.

A team at the ADK hospital in the Maldives has performed the country’s first coronary artery bypass surgery.

A woman receiving a heart-lung transplant was also able to donate her heart, and she met the woman who received her heart at the Transplant Games of America.

The American University of Beirut Medical Center in Lebanon became the first in the country to perform a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy.

Drugs and Devices

Boston Scientific has announced progress toward new US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of its Lotus Edge valve.

An investigational treatment for bronchiolitis obliterans, which can occur in patients who receive a lung transplant, has been granted Orphan Drug Designation by the US FDA.

Research, Trials, and Funding

An analysis of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Registry found diabetes to be a predictor of poor transplant-free survival in patients diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as adults.

A useful if somewhat belated account of the Papworth experience in lung donation after circulatory determined death (DCD) until 2015. There are no data on heart and lung transplants in that 6-year period. No DCD recipient required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and DCD single lung recipients did badly. Quite interesting to see that total ischemic time was not higher in DCD, as if its warm ischemic time was somewhat factored in the planning (eg, considering DCD donation from only short distances from Papworth Hospital).

The authors reviewed their experience with 602 patients who underwent mitral repair for type II mitral regurgitation. Mitral stenosis was defined as a mean transmitral pressure gradient (MTPG) of > 5 mm Hg, and 51 patients (8.5%) had mitral stenosis by this criterion. The authors found  on postoperative echocardiography that annuloplasty with a smaller-sized ring was associated with a higher MTPG, PA pressures, residual TR gradient, and incidence of new-onset atrial fibrillation.