When couples attended smoking cessation programs together, their odds of quitting were nearly six times higher than for people who attempted to kick the habit alone, according to preliminary research presented April 12 at EuroPrevent 2019.

An April 2 story in the New York Times highlighted a potentially dangerous insurance coverage gap faced by heart transplant patients and recipients of other organs—the immunosuppressive drugs they need to prevent organ rejection sometimes aren’t covered by Medicare if they received the transplants before enrolling in the program.

Domestic responsibilities put a damper on career satisfaction for proceduralist mothers more than for physician mothers in nonprocedural specialties, suggests a study published April 10 in JAMA Surgery.

A team-based protocol for treating cardiogenic shock helped one center boost its 30-day survival rates for those patients by nearly 20 percentage points over a two-year period, researchers reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Transsubclavian or transaxillary (TAx) access has become the preferred route for balloon-expandable TAVR when femoral access isn’t feasible, a new analysis found. Outcomes were generally favorable with TAx TAVR compared to other alternative access techniques, with the exception of higher stroke rates, researchers reported in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

French drugmaker Sanofi announced on April 10 a plan to lower its insulin prices to $99 per month for some U.S. patients, beginning in June. The announcement came amid a series of congressional hearings about drug costs and was met with questions about why this move and other recent cost-cutting measures took so long.

Cardiologists earn the fourth-most money of any medical specialty, according to Medscape’s 2019 physician compensation report, bringing in an average of $430,000 each year.

The FDA has granted a breakthrough therapy designation to a novel reversal agent for ticagrelor called PB2452, PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals announced April 8.

A deep learning model trained on more than 1.5 million electrocardiograms can reliably detect hyperkalemia—or abnormally high potassium levels in the blood—among patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), Mayo Clinic researchers reported April 3 in JAMA Cardiology.

People diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at 40 or younger were about twice as likely to die over 5.6 years of follow-up compared to age-matched controls, according to a registry study from Sweden. But the relationship weakened substantially as the age of onset progressed, such that patients diagnosed in their 80s carried no excess mortality risk.