Joseph James Pappas, the accused gunman in the shooting of former president George H.W. Bush’s cardiologist Mark Hausknecht, MD, shot himself in the head after being confronted by law enforcement officers who were attempting to arrest him in Houston. He was formally charged with the murder of Hausknecht on Thursday, August 2.
A New Jersey cardiologist specializing in electrophysiology was sentenced July 31 to 20 months in prison for billing the Veterans Affairs (VA) program hundreds of thousands of dollars for services he never performed.
Patients without electrocardiographic (ECG) evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy were significantly more likely to die in the two years after transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), researchers reported July 30 in Clinical Cardiology.
A new North American consensus statement published July 30 in Circulation recommends a non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulant (NOAC) and the P2Y12 inhibitor clopidogrel for most patients with atrial fibrillation undergoing PCI.
A program designed to provide rapid follow-up visits to heart failure patients after hospital discharge improved 30-day survival, reduced readmissions and saved money, according to a retrospective study published in the American Journal of Medical Quality.
The salaries of cardiothoracic surgeons are increasing faster than any other specialty, according to the American Medical Group Association’s 2018 Compensation and Productivity Survey. Cardiothoracic surgeons pulled in a median of $734,299 last year, up from $690,000 the previous year and a 23.1 percent increase from 2015.
“Unless we as a profession have a dialogue about burnout more broadly, all the things we do in training will have a limited impact,” Tait Shanafelt, MD, chief wellness officer at Stanford Medicine, told Kaiser Health News.
Researchers with LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine believe they’ve discovered a molecular explanation for why hypoxia increases the risk for blood clots.
Lowering LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) beyond guideline-recommended levels further reduces cardiovascular events without compromising safety, according to a meta-analysis published Aug. 1 in JAMA Cardiology.
More than three-fourths of patients who received percutaneous balloon mitral valvuloplasty (PBMV) at a center in Brazil maintained procedural benefit over a median follow-up of 8.3 years, researchers reported in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.
