Tenth Birthday Of Life-saving TAVI Heart Implant - UK Lags Behind Europe In Patient Use

Over the span of a lifetime, the human heart beats more than two billion times. With each beat, flexible valves within the heart's chambers open and shut to prevent blood flowing backwards. With advancing age these valves can start to fail; the opening can become narrowed or the valve may leak. Narrowing of the aortic valve - known as aortic stenosis - is one of the most common forms of heart disease...
Read more »

Aspirin May Slow Brain Decline In Elderly Women With Heart Risk

Low dose aspirin may ward off cognitive decline in elderly women with a high risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke, conclude researchers from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who write about their five-year study in a paper published 3 October in the online journal BMJ Open...
Read more »

New Expandable Prosthetic Valves For Children With Congenital Heart Disease

Surgeons at Boston Children's Hospital have successfully implanted a modified version of a expandable prosthetic heart valve in several children with mitral valve disease. Unlike traditional prosthetic valves that have a fixed diameter, the expandable valve can be enlarged as a child grows, thus potentially avoiding the repeat valve replacement surgeries that are commonly required in a growing child. The new paradigm of expandable mitral valve replacement has potential to revolutionize care for infants and children with complex mitral valve disease. The surgical team, led by Sitaram M...
Read more »

Kidney Failure And Heart Disease In Diabetic Patients May Be Affected By Race

Diabetes is among the ten leading causes of death in both white and African American patients, but the prevalence of diabetic complications are race-specific, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). "This study is one of only a few to assess whether there is a racial difference in the incidence of diabetic complications," said Gang Hu, MD, PhD, of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lead author of the study...
Read more »

Alternative For Regulating Heart Beat Offered By Innovative New Defibrillator

A new ground-breaking technology was recently used at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (UOHI) where two cardiologists, Dr. David Birnie and Dr. Pablo Nery, implanted a new innovative leadless defibrillator, the subcutaneous implantable cardioverter defibrillator (S-ICD), to a 18 year-old patient. Under Health Canada's special access program, this was only the third time this new type of ICD had been implanted in Canada. Conventional defibrillators, known as transvenous defibrillators, are implanted with wires, called the leads, that snake through veins into the heart...
Read more »