Journal and News Scan

This article brings attention to the need for representation of women in cardiovascular research trials, with women typically accounting for only 20 percent of participants. This comes following a Lancet commission aimed at reducing the global burden of cardiovascular disease in women. From this, investigators of the ROMA trial have launched ROMA-Women, given that women only represented 15 percent of their sample. The ROMA-Women trial is a nested design, one not previously seen in cardiovascular trials. This is achieved by leveraging the ROMA infrastructure and looks to be the first cardiac surgery trial dedicated to women.

Transcatheter pulmonary valve replacement (tPVR) is a key therapy in RVOT pathologies but is associated with long term risks such as infective endocarditis (IE). In fact, some reports claim a higher IE risk compared to surgical pulmonary valve replacement. This paper investigates outcomes to different management strategies used to treat IE in patients who underwent tPVR. A total of 69 cases were identified with 98 admissions due to a readmission rate of 29 percent. During the initial admission, surgical rates were 22 percent. Surgical rates were 36 percent overall, as the likelihood of surgical intervention increased with each subsequent admission. Mortality rate in the overall and surgical cohort was 4.3 percent and 8 percent respectively.

Lung transplantation remains the best option for patients with end-stage lung disease. Despite improving outcomes, the procedure confers significant morbidity risk. This paper presents a single right-sided lung transplant in a sixty-nine-year-old recipient utilizing the Da Vinci robotic system. The patient had a diagnosis of end-stage choleric obstructive pulmonary disease refractory to medical management and was oxygen dependent at baseline. The authors describe their perioperative planning, intraoperative details, and the course of the patient following transplantation and at the eighteen month follow up.

A retrospective cohort analysis of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database of 128,723 patients—who underwent pulmonary resection for non-small cell lung cancer between 2009 and 2019—identified 1,873 (1.5 percent) with interstitial lung disease. Patients with interstitial lung disease were more likely to smoke (90 percent vs 85 percent, P < .001), have pulmonary hypertension (6 percent vs 1.7 percent, P < .001), diffusion capacity of the lung for carbon monoxide < 40 percent (11 percent vs 4 percent, P < .001), and underwent more sublobar resections (34 percent vs 23 percent, P < .001) compared with patients without interstitial lung disease. Patients with interstitial lung disease had increased postoperative mortality (5.1 percent vs 1.2 percent; odds ratio, 3.94; 95 percent CI, 3.09-5.01; P < .001) and composite morbidity and mortality (13.2 percent vs 7.4 percent, P < .001).