As insulin prices in the U.S. continue to surge, lower-income diabetics are struggling to afford a drug their life depends on, researchers report in a JAMA Internal Medicine study published Dec. 3.

Although female authorship in cardiology journals is improving, women continue to be underrepresented in research publications—particularly as first and senior authors, according to an analysis in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

Implantable medical devices—from pacemakers to cardioverter-defibrillators to neurostimulators—are on the rise, but their popularity in clinical practice means they’re also a prime target for ill-intentioned hackers, a trio of doctors reported in Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine in November.

The use of paclitaxel-coated balloons and stents in the femoropopliteal arteries of patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD) was associated with relative mortality increases of 68 percent and 93 percent at two and five years of follow-up, respectively, according to a meta-analysis published Dec. 6 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a stem cell-based test to determine whether genetic variants in heart muscle cells are benign or pathogenic. In other words, they’ve added some certainty to variants of uncertain significance—the tricky alleles that can either contribute to the development of diseases or be completely harmless.

Hospitals with favorable outcomes for surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) procedures subsequently see better transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) outcomes when they launch TAVR programs, researchers reported in JAMA Cardiology Dec. 5, suggesting the quality of an institution’s surgical team could be an indicator of how they’ll fare after they initiate TAVR.

Receiving the flu vaccine could improve cardiovascular and all-cause mortality outcomes in patients with heart failure, according to a large-scale study of Danish citizens published Dec. 10 in Circulation.

About 1 in 8 patients who received endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) for acute ischemic stroke during a two-year period in the U.S. were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, according to an analysis of the Nationwide Readmissions Database published in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

One MI survivor is raising awareness for heart attack symptoms in women after her Dec. 9 tweets about an unusual episode went viral.

DUBLIN — December 10, 2018 — Medtronic plc (NYSE:MDT), the global leader in medical technology, today announced it has been named one of America's Most JUST Companies in 2018, according to Forbes magazine and JUST Capital, a nonprofit that ranks publicly-traded corporations on the issues Americans care about most.