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This online resource for heart patients, their families, and caregivers is dedicated to delivering accurate and personalized information at a time of need. The Heart Profilers™ help people with heart disease make informed treatment decisions for an optimal outcome.
Provided as a FREE service, these tools are...
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built with help from the best doctors
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based on the most significant research published in leading medical journals
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designed by experienced clinical specialists
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continuously updated
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New Clinical Research Study Reports
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The Study Reports below summarize clinical research that has recently appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals and has been approved by our Medical Editorial Board for inclusion in the heartfacts.com database.
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The full-text journal articles themselves are not available here, however a summary of the article is provided along with the full MedLine citation. To determine whether specific articles are relevant to your own medical situation, click on the appropriate Heart Profiler™ from the list above.
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| Recent Study Information |
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New heart failure guidelines stress early diagnosis and treatment
Early diagnosis and new treatments can help battle heart failure — a growing national problem that causes 1 million hospital admissions each year, according to new guidelines released today by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA).
Bypass may surpass stents for many heart patients
For patients with two or more diseased coronary arteries, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) is associated with higher adjusted rates of long-term survival than stenting. The researchers found that after adjusting for factors, such as age and other illnesses, significantly more patients in the CABG group survived than those who received a stent.
Older patients can gain good relief from either medications or PCI
Patients aged 75 years or older with angina despite standard medical therapy benefit from both optimal medical therapy and percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to open narrowed arteries in terms of symptom relief and quality of life. The findings also suggest that these patients should be offered an invasive assessment despite their high risk of cardiac complications and previous revascularization.
Amiodarone or implanted defibrillator: which extends survival in heart failure patients?
Researchers find that a shock-only implanted defibrillator reduced the risk of death by 23% relative to placebo. Amiodarone had no beneficial effect on survival.
Carvedilol improves quality of life and increases survival
Carvedilol reduced the combined risk of death or hospitalization for a cardiovascular reason by 27% and the combined risk of death or hospitalization for heart failure by 31% as compared to those treated with placebo. Patients in the carvedilol group also spent 27% fewer days in the hospital for any reason and 40% fewer days in the hospital for heart failure than those taking the placebo.
Which is better for patients with atrial fibrillation, controlling heart rate or heart rhythm?
The researchers concluded that drug-based management of atrial fibrillation with a rhythm-control strategy offered no advantage over a rate-control strategy in cardiac or vascular deaths and may be associated with an increased noncardiovascular death rate.
Which lipid-lowering strategy is better for patients?
The study showed an advantage for patients in the intensive high-dose atorvastatin group across all subgroups studied in terms of survival, heart attacks, unstable angina requiring hospitalization, or the need for balloon angioplasty or bypass surgery compared to the standard-dose regimen with pravastatin. The researchers also concluded that after an acute coronary syndrome, the most effective target LDL cholesterol level may be lower than that recommended in current guidelines.
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