Andrea Baer, director of patient advocacy, discusses how Mended Hearts and Mended Little Hearts provide peer support to heart disease patients, families and caregivers. Participants benefit from receiving advice and feedback from people who have gone through similar experiences. Case studies from Mended Hearts have shown peer-to-peer support helps reduce readmissions and improve adherence to medications and treatment plans.

Cardiovascular providers discuss their biggest challenges, including payers refusing to cover tests, procedures or medications that could benefit patients and providing costly and beneficial therapies and procedures while dealing with cost constraints. There are plenty more, listen in.

Cardiologists J.P. Reilly, MD, and Larry S. Dean, MD, offer insight on the two-year results of the ABSORB III trial that evaluated Abbott’s Absorb bioresorbable vascular scaffold. They also talk about the March 18th FDA advisory letter alerting healthcare professionals of an increase in major adverse cardiac events with the Absorb compared with the Xience drug-eluting stent. As they note, physicians need to be careful about selecting the right patients who may benefit from bioresorbable stents, using them in right-sized vessels and making sure to properly deploy the devices.

Older adults with atrial fibrillation who underwent left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) at the time of cardiac surgery had an approximately 40 percent reduction in thromboembolism and a 15 percent reduction in all-cause mortality, according to a database analysis.

Levosimendan, a drug used to prevent heart failure during heart surgery, was shown to not reduce adverse outcomes in patients at a high risk for low cardiac output syndrome in a new study debuted at the American College of Cardiology’s 66th Annual Scientific Session.

New results on Abbott Vascular’s Absorb everolimus-eluting bioresorbable vascular scaffold (BVS) were revealed at this year’s American College of Cardiology (ACC)’s Scientific Session, providing disappointing results for the stent that are consistent with a trend set by previous studies.

A randomized study found that using two FDA-approved cerebral embolic protection devices in patients undergoing surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) was not associated with an improvement in freedom from clinical or radiographic infarction or clinical stroke.

At 12 months, patients with stable angina or acute coronary syndrome had similar rates of major adverse cardiac events whether they underwent revascularization guided by instantaneous wave-free ratio (iFR) or fractional flow reserve (FFR), according to a randomized, registry-based trial.