Biosite and the FDA have notified healthcare professionals of the Class 1 recall of the Biosite brand Triage Cardiac Panel, a test used by health professionals as an aid in the diagnosis of a heart attack.

Zoll Medical has completed its acquisition of the assets of Alsius' intravascular temperature management device business for approximately $12 million.

Compared with bare-metal stents, drug-eluting stents are associated with a similar long-term incidence of death or MI, and provide a clinically important decrease in the rate of restenosis among high-risk patients, according to the latest results from the SCAAR registry published May 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Medicines Company has reported net losses for its fiscal 2009 first quarter results.

Despite considerable progress in treating patients who suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, survival andespeciallyneurologic outcomes remain relatively poor. Two areas in which more progress can be made are improved resuscitative measures, including the use of an automatic support pump, and better ventilation control. A third area that is slowly gaining traction is hypothermia therapy, according to Timothy D. Henry, an interventional cardiologist and director of research at the Minneapolis Heart Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minnesota.

Vascular closure devices after PCI are experiencing an increase in utilization and vendors often speak to their benefits. Yet, complication rates vary widely, with seemingly little intention to explore the root of the problem, particularly in randomized controlled trials.

Heart attack patients who develop serious arrhythmia in connection with procedures to open blocked arteries face a significantly higher risk of death for several months after the procedure, when compared with similar patients who do not develop such complications, according to research published in the May 6 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Medtronic has laid off about 240 workers from a cardiovascular division plant in Santa Rosa, Calif., in a plan to shift the work to a lower-cost facility in Galway, Ireland.