Home-delivered sodium-restricted Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH/SRD) meals after heart failure (HF) hospitalizations appeared safe in some patients, has the potential to improve HF symptoms and can reduce readmissions, according to new research in Circulation: Heart Failure.

Investor’s Business Daily published a profile of Johns Hopkins physician Helen Brooke Taussig, MD, who overcame an initial rejection to medical school due to gender discrimination and went on to create the field of pediatric cardiology.

Specifically, the kits provide prior authorization information for PCSK9 inhibitors to treat lipid disorders, direct oral anticoagulants for stroke prevention and angiotensin receptor-neprilysin inhibitors for heart failure treatment. Those three categories of drugs were commonly pinpointed as being “always” or “often” denied by insurance companies in surveys of providers.

Developing type 1 diabetes before the age of 10 shortens the lifespans of women by almost 18 years and of men by about 14 years, according to a Swedish registry study published in The Lancet.

On Aug. 9, the FDA expanded its list of valsartan products currently under recall to include other items that contain the active ingredient, which may be tainted with a carcinogenic impurity, manufactured by Hetero Labs Limited in India.

Coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD) identified with cardiac stress PET testing was a better predictor of adverse events among obese patients than body mass index (BMI) and other traditional risk factors, researchers reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The Music Therapy Program at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas integrates music into stroke patients’ healing process to help patients relax after stroke. It is also a way to help meet health targets set by patients’ speech therapists.

CMS proposed on Aug. 9 an overhaul to accountable care organizations (ACOs), which would require ACOs to more quickly assume financial risk. But critics predict the changes will cause a mass exodus from the Medicare Shared Savings Program.

Women are more likely to survive a heart attack if their emergency room physician is also a woman, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Swedish researchers have identified a potential mechanism for the endothelial dysfunction found in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D): increased expression of the arginase I protein in red blood cells.