>>WEDNESDAY

Progenitor Cells Produce Positive Outcomes
Treatment with enriched bone-marrow-derived progenitor cells was associated with a significant improvement in the combined outcome of death, MI or rehospitalization for heart failure.
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Yock Is Career Achievement Award Winner
The Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) honored Paul G. Yock, MD, with this year’s TCT Career Achievement Award. Yock is the Martha Meier Weiland Professor of Medicine and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.
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Roundtable Takes on ‘Conflict of Interest’ Debate
Representatives from academia, research, industry and regulatory agencies gathered Tuesday evening for a roundtable discussion on a controversial issue in health care: the potential impact of conflicts of interest.
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Taxus Liberte as Safe, Effective as Express
The Taxus Liberte stent was found comparable in performance to the Taxus Express stent in two trials reported here on Wednesday.
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Early Data Show Promise for Extended-Elution DES
The Endeavor Resolute stent showed low late loss, minimal neointimal hyperplastic in-growth and low adverse clinical events in four-month data reported yesterday by Ian Meredith, MD, PhD, of Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia.
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Eric Harlick Wins TCT Challenging Cases 2006 Award
This year’s TCT Challenging Cases Award went to Eric Harlick, MD, of the Toronto General Hospital. The award, now in its second year, recognizes cases that are unique and challenging.
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New Techniques Developed for Bifurcation Lesions
Emerging issues in the area of bifurcation lesions continue to be of interest to interventional cardiologists, even as the utility of double-stenting is debated.
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MRI Offers High Resolution for Cardiovascular Diagnosis
Magnetic resonance imaging can explore anatomy and function with superior resolution and enables clinicians to diagnose cardiac conditions that may not be detectable by other imaging modalities, according to Steven D. Wolff, MD, PhD, Director of Cardiovascular MRI and CT for the Cardiovascular Research Foundation.
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Mitral Regurgitation Promising, Needs Further Validation
The field of percutaneous mitral valve therapy has made significant advances to address the challenges that beleaguered first-generation devices, according to Ted E. Feldman, MD, of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Evanston, Ill.
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ETHOS I: No Incremental Benefit with Estradiol-eluting Stents
Initial data from ETHOS I, a randomized, controlled trial of estradiol-eluting stents, found no evidence of benefit with the stents compared with bare-metal stents.
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ABSORB: Bioabsorbable Coronary Stents Successfully and Safely Deployed
New first-in-man data indicate that a fully bioabsorable drug-eluting coronary stent was successfully and safely deployed in patients with single, de novo, native coronary artery lesions.
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Treat Critical Limb Ischemia Early
As the population of people with diabetes grows in the United States, so will the number of patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI), according to a speaker at TCT yesterday. The incidence of CLI is currently about 500 to 1,000 per million people, according to Gary M. Ansel, MD, of Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
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More Endovascular Specialists Needed
"As we continue to fight amongst ourselves over who is the best endovascular interventionist, the public has a totally different perception,” said Michael R. Jaff, DO, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Vascular Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
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CDRH, NHLBI Discuss Achievements and Initiatives
Virtual clinical trial subjects, improved regulatory procedures, and new gene therapy research programs were among the topics of discussion at Wednesday’s Health and Human Services Town Hall Meeting.
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Pay for Performance, More Data Collection Could Be the Future for Doctors, Hospitals
During yesterday’s HHS Town Hall Meeting, Steve Phurrough, MD, MPA, Director of Coverage and Analysis at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, offered some insight into issues before the agency.
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Olympia: Taxus Liberte Performed Well in High-Risk Groups
Phase-1 and phase-3 data from the Olympia registry of the Taxus Liberte paclitaxel-eluting stent (Boston Scientific) indicate low rates of cardiac events in high-risk subgroups.
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REWARDS Registry Examines Stent Thrombosis
In a registry review presented yesterday by Ron Waksman, MD, the Cypher stent (Cordis/Johnson & Johnson) showed a two to three times greater risk of thrombosis than the Taxus stent (Boston Scientific) among 2,769 patients implanted at the Washington Hospital Center.
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Should U.S. Adopt European Clopidogrel Dosing Standards?
The TCT Debate of the Day on Monday focused on whether drug-eluting stents should be used more conservatively due to increased safety concerns and whether the European practice of extended, post-procedure clopidogrel therapy should be considered by U.S. surgeons.
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CTA Holds Promise for Interventionalists
The integration of coronary computed tomographic angiography CTA into the management of interventional cardiologists is not yet fully justified, but its use is no longer premature, according to Patrick W. Serruys, MD, PhD, Professor of Intervetnional Cardiology at the Interunversity Cardiological Institute, The Netherlands, and Erasmus University.
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Percutaneous Aortic Valve Replacement: Early Promise
Past research has confirmed that transcatheter aortic valve replacement (AVR) therapy is effective in either balloon-expandable or self-expanding delivery systems. The short-term hemodynamic results have also been consistently excellent, according to Martin B. Leon, MD, founder of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation and Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. However, the route of approach, either antegrade or retrograde, has complicated the procedure.
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Infection May Raise Atherosclerosis Risk
Patients with infections, particularly recurring infections, may be at increased risk of developing atherosclerosis, according to Stephen Epstein, MD, from the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Washington Hospital Center.
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Endovascular Thoracic Aneurysm Challenging
Emerging methods of thoracic endovascular aortic repair show lower morbidity and mortality than open surgical repair, but questions remain. “I would not call this the new standard of care. That is too euphemistic, without a question mark attached,” Christoph A. Nienaber, MD, University of Rostock in Germany, said during a presentation yesterday.
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Surgical Options May Shape Interventional Cardiology
Arterial grafts for weak blood flow, along with new technologies and devices, may present solid solutions for the future of interventional cardiology and will further improve the periprocedural capabilities of cardiologists.
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CABG Superior to PTCA in Patients with Diabetes
Patients with diabetes are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease, which places them in a patient subgroup that tends to benefit more from coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) rather than percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), according to Bernard Gersh, MD, Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
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No Differences in CIN Shown Between Iodixanol, Iopamidol
The iso-osmolar contrast agent iodixanol demonstrated no difference in the rates of contrast-induced nephropathy compared with the low osmolar contrast agent iopamidol in high-risk patients, according to new results from the CARE trial.
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DES Safety Issues: Scope of the Problem is ‘Quite Small’
With this week’s popular press coverage and controversy over the safety of drug-eluting stents, physician offices are likely to receive a higher frequency of calls from worried patients regarding stenting procedures.
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Italian Cardiologist Wins Annual Young Investigator Award
This year’s recipient of the Thomas J. Linnemeier Spirit of Interventional Cardiology Young Investigator Award is Alaide Chieffo, MD, an interventional cardiologist from San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy.
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No ‘Real-World’ Difference Between PES and SE
Taxus (Boston Scientific) and Cypher (Cordis/Johnson & Johnson) stents performed similarly in a randomized, prospective trial of nearly 2,100 Danish patients who received percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and were followed up in a “real-world” setting.
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