In Global News: Heart Failure in Pregnancy, Unconscious Bias in CT Surgery, and Research From the STS Annual Meeting

Patient Care and General Interest
As part of the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women program, a patient shares her story of discovering she had rheumatic heart disease after she went into heart failure during her pregnancy.
 
Drugs and Devices
Fresenius Medical Care will begin distributing CytoSorbents Coporation’s CytoSorb® blood purification technology in Korea and Mexico, with the aim of serving critically ill and cardiac surgery patients in both countries, pending market registration clearance from the respective local health authorities.
CorMatrix Cardiovascular, Inc, received investigational device exemption from the US Food and Drug Administration for the early feasibility study of their Cor ECM® Tricuspid Valve.
 
Research, Trials, and Funding
The negative effects of unconscious bias and approaches to work against it were in focus at the recent Annual Meeting of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons in San Diego, California.
Also at January’s STS Annual Meeting, a team from Oregon Health and Science University in Portland presented their experience with intraoperative autologous blood donation in cardiac surgery and a group from Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia presented their efforts to promote on-table extubation after coronary artery bypass.
Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have engineered an adenovirus that selectively replicates in cancer cell lines including lung cancer, which they used to suppress tumor cell growth in mice.