Fish consumption to prevent stroke and highlights from ASH

This month’s edition of Cardiology Review once again includes an expanded News Beat section with highlights from the recent American Society of Hypertension meeting. We begin our features with a fascinating entry in the lipid disorders section, which is also our first CME article. Dr. Ikuo Yokoyama and colleagues from Japan evaluate impaired myocardial vasodilation during stress in 44 patients with hypercholesterolemia. They compared the improvement in the vasodilatory responses observed between two HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins)—simvastatin and pravastatin—and found a significant difference. Drs. Parag A. Tipnis and Peter M. Buttrick comment on their surprising results for Cardiology Review.

In our second CME feature, in the stroke section, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues evaluated the association between fish consumption (broiled and baked versus fried) and the risk of ischemic stroke in 4,775 adults 65 years or older. Dr. Douglas Dulli considers this study “the catch of the day” for practitioners with elderly and other stroke-prone patients.

In the hypertension section, Drs. J. Richard Jennings and Thomas W. Kamarck correlated a 7-year progression of carotid intima-media thickening with exaggerated blood pressure responses during mental stress in 756 men aged 42 to 60. Their provocative results are discussed by Drs. Naveed N. Masani, Nobuyuki Miyawaki, and John K. Maesaka, who note that their study should be applauded for contributions in this arena where information is still scarce, but that further long-term studies are needed.

In the arrhythmia section, Drs. Jacqueline M. Leung and Wayne H. Bellows assess the importance of left atrial function in contributing to postoperative atrial fibrillation. Three hundred patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery served as the population base for this article. We asked Dr. Harold L. Lazar, our cardiac surgical consultant, for his views on these findings.