Cardiology

Have the Appropriate Use Criteria for transthoracic echocardiography achieved their goal of having a significant clinical impact on physician decision making?

Early diagnosis by primary care physicians and aggressive treatment are essential to slowing the epidemic of kidney and cardiovascular disease.

Researchers have studied the effects of hormone therapy on the lipid profiles of postmenopausal women.

Study shows patients who switched from treatment with a ritonavir-boosted protease inhibitor maintained virologic suppression, experienced improved lipid profiles, and suffered fewer side effects.

New insurance protections, changes in how AIDS Drug Assistance Program benefits are counted, Medicaid expansion, and other provisions in the law will mean better care for many patients.

Researchers determine that recurrent miscarriage risk is elevated in women who carry the ACE I/D polymorphism.

Researchers at Duke University discover that hearts from donors with histories of cardiac arrest can be successfully transplanted, sometimes with excellent outcomes.

Though patients may not disclose suicidal thoughts and behaviors to their physicians, their blood test results can be dead giveaways.

Though many patients indicate side effects as the reason they stop taking their prescribed statins, clinical trials have not documented high discontinuation rates due to adverse drug reactions.

Cardiac surgery teams should be trained to improve communication and teamwork, and hospitals should establish robust quality assurance systems to identify and correct safety hazards.

Patients who are unaware that they have diabetes may have less contact with healthcare professionals, receive less aggressive treatment, or have a poorer understanding of the disease and the actions required to treat it - all of which may be responsible for their increased risk of morbidity and mortality.

Medicare will be assessing $227 million in fines against hospitals in 49 states as part of the federal government's campaign to reduce the number of patients readmitted within a month of discharge.

Though EMD Serono's Novantrone (mitoxantrone) injection is the only drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (SPMS), progressive-relapsing multiple sclerosis (PRMS), or worsening relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), its use is associated with significant risks.

A pair of researchers based in Texas has gained valuable insight into the correlation between individual cell type in the tissues of gout patients and comorbidity factors of the chronic inflammatory autoimmune disorder.

As part of a new pilot program, more than 300 US hospitals have begun to voluntarily report 30-day all-cause risk standardized readmission rates after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

Although previous studies have already established that low serum sodium levels commonly occur in critically ill children who require hospitalization, a team of Polish researchers aimed to more closely evaluate the link between hyponatremia and the severity of a child's community-acquired pneumonia (CAP).

Two recently published case studies examine the diagnosis and treatment of hyponatremia in patients who are also suffering from comparatively rare comorbidities.

With strong clinical evidence and adverse event reports linking Daiichi Sankyo's high blood pressure medication Benicar (olmesartan medoxomil) to the gastrointestinal condition known as sprue-like enteropathy, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved changes for the drug's label to include a warning about that risk.