July 2012: Issue Overview and Highlights

Dear Readers,

The goal of the Journal of Invasive Cardiology is to provide state-of-the-art information that will support clinicians in the effective management of patients with cardiovascular disease. There are many selections in this issue that I hope readers will find useful in their clinical practice to promote more effective treatment of cardiovascular disease patients. 

This month, we introduce a new column where timely and sometimes controversial topics will be discussed. This month’s contribution to Invasive Thoughts was written by Srihari S. Naidu, MD, Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, Interventional Cardiology Fellowship Program and Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Treatment Center at Winthrop University Hospital on Long Island, and Associate Professor of Medicine at SUNY – Stony Brook School of Medicine. Dr. Naidu writes about the challenges facing physicians as they attempt to maintain their position as patient advocates amidst the myriad pressures to contain costs that are particularly focused on cardiology.

In the first original research article, Dr Louis Miller and colleagues from the VA New York Harbor Health Care System, New York Campus and New York University School of Medicine in New York report on their research study looking at very long clinical follow-up after fractional flow reserve-guided coronary revascularization. In the next research selection, Dr Michael Lee from UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, Kyung Woo Park from Seoul National University Hospital in Seoul and collaborators from centers in Korea and the United States present the results of their multicenter international registry of unprotected left main coronary artery PCI with everolimus-eluting stents. Next, Dr Armando Pérez de Prado and colleagues from Fundación Investigacion Sanitaria en León – HemoLeon and Institute of Biomedicine in León, Spain report on their animal study of vasomotor response to different endothelium-dependent vasodilators. Dr Mauro Maioli from the Division of Cardiology at Prato Hospital in Prato, Italy and colleagues from institutions in Europe and the United States present their analysis of the impact of preprocedural TIMI flow on myocardial perfusion, distal embolization, and mortality in patients with STEMI treated with primary angioplasty and GP IIb/IIIa inhibitors. 

In the next selection, Dr Dale Tavris from the US Food and Drug Administration and collaborators from Yale University, University of Colorado at Boulder, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the American College of Cardiology in Washington, D.C. present their study evaluating hemostasis strategies and their effects on bleeding and vascular complications at the femoral access site following PCI. Dr Sajid Dhakam and colleagues from the Section of Cardiology, Department of Medicine and the Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan report on the safety and efficacy of drug-eluting balloons in the treatment of drug-eluting in-stent restenosis.

The next three original articles are from the TAVR and Radial Access Technique special sections. In the first TAVR section selection, Drs Emmanuel Sorbets, Michael Choby, and Didier Tchetche from the Clinique Pasteur, Groupe CardioVasculaire Interventionnel present their study assessing transcatheter aortic valve implantation with either CoreValve or SAPIEN XT devices in patients with a single coronary artery. Drs Mayank Agrawal and Rajesh Sachdeva provide a commentary on this topic. For Radial Access Advances, Dr Xavier Carrillo and colleagues from the Cardiology Service, Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol in Barcelona, Spain present an assessment of their 8-year experience in regard to the safety and efficacy of transradial access in coronary angiography. Next, Dr Velasco and colleagues from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas analyze the feasibility of using larger sheaths for radial interventions and which factors lead to likely success.

Also in the Radial Access Technique section, Drs Nevin Baker, Sheharyar Ali, and James Blankenship from the Department of Cardiology, Heart and Vascular Institute at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania and Interventional Cardiology at the Sparks Health System in Fort Smith, Arkansas present their approach using left radial artery access to perform angioplasty in a descending aortic saphenous vein graft to circumflex coronary artery.

Dr Tak Kwan and colleagues at Beth Israel Medical Center and New York University in New York present a review on achieving perfection for precise ostial stent placement. Drs Tesfaldet Michael, Subhash Banerjee and Emmanouil Brilakis present a New Technique selection on the role of internal mammary artery bypass grafts in performing retrograde chronic total occlusion intervention.

In the first Clinical Images selection,  Drs Jeffrey Cook, Abhishek Deshmukh, and Rajesh Sachdeva present hemodynamic findings in a case in which a coronary thrombus spontaneously recanalized. In the second report, Drs Aristotelis Papayannis, Tesfaldet Michael, and Emmanouil Brilakis highlight the challenges associated with the use of the GuideLiner catheter in PCI.

Also included in this month’s issue are selected abstracts from the Complex Cardiovascular Therapeutics (C3) meeting, held June 19-23 in Orlando, Florida.

Articles published in our “Online Exclusive” section can be found on our website (www.invasivecardiology.com). This month, we have included a case showing inapparent atrial flutter due to atrial dissociation, myocardial infarction in an elderly patient caused by a voluminous fistula between the right coronary artery and a branch of the pulmonary artery,  a patient with myocardial infarction with embolic origin, a case showing transcatheter closure without conventional venovenous loop of a right pulmonary artery to left atrium fistula, the use of a wire control catheter to treat complex pulmonary artery vein anatomy, a case showing management of a set of complex complications associated with saphenous vein graft disease intervention, and a case demonstrating sheathless ulnar percutaneous coronary intervention for bifurcation lesions. Several of these selections contain supplemental angiography video footage to give you more complete information about the patients discussed. 

Also, use the website links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from our home page to follow and contribute to interesting discussions regarding the articles in this month’s issue.

Sincerely,

Richard E. Shaw, PhD, FACC, FACA
Editor-in-Chief