Seattle may be the best place to live if keeping blood pressure at a healthy range is your priority. The home device maker iHealth reported that 19.6 percent of patients in Seattle had high blood pressure, well below the national average of 36.3 percent.

The spring season of cardiovascular conferences has a decidedly practical bent to it this year, which will be capped by a program that focuses on the tangible and achievable.

Those patients most likely to benefit from statin therapy may be overlooked by physicians who focus on cholesterol levels rather than overall cardiovascular risk. A study published in the May/June issue of Annals of Family Medicine determined that more than 14 million at-risk patients were undertreated in the U.S.

In order to add to scientific and medical progress, Boehringer Ingelheim is engaged in a program to make clinical study data and other clinical study related documents more widely accessible for approved products or after termination of a drug development program.

Primary care physician John Henning Schumann, MD, chronicles his encounters with patients’ obsession with cholesterol. “If you ask me to boil down the modern doctor-patient relationship to its most basic elements, cholesterol pretty much sums it up,” he writes in NPR Shots.

The longevity of some implantable cardiac devices can vary greatly by manufacturer, according to a Danish study presented May 8 at the Heart Rhythm Society scientific session in San Francisco. The study showed Medtronic with the highest rate of battery depletion or device failure.

This week the federal government credited a program that penalizes hospitals for what it determines are excessive 30-day readmissions for heart failure, acute MI and pneumonia for a drop in all-cause readmissions. That may be hard to prove or refute.

Bloomberg News reports that the FDA is funding an independent study to assess whether generic versions of the beta-blocker metoprolol succinate chemically match the name-brand product. Patients and physicians have been complaining of side effects and efficacy problems.