In Global News: Screening for Congenital Heart Disease, Regenerative Medicine for the Heart, and Predicting Heart Failure Outcomes [1]
Patient Care and General Interest
Screening infants for critical congenital heart disease at birth is becoming mandatory in the US state of Idaho [3] and the Indian state of Kerala [4].
Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, has completed its 500th heart transplant [5].
Drugs and Devices
The Venus P-Valve self-expanding pulmonary valve [6] from Venus Medtech has been launched in Canada. The valve was developed for percutaneous implantation in native right ventricular outflow tracts.
The US Food and Drug Administration has issued a Class I recall for the HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device [7] from Medtronic due to the possibility of an interrupted connection between the power source and the device controller.
Research, Trials, and Funding
A cardiac surgery team in Japan has approval to test induced pluripotent stem cell grafts in patients with damaged heart tissue [8] to determine the safety of this regenerative medicine approach.
Interim data from a phase II trial from Leading BioSciences suggests that the company’s serine protease inhibitor, which targets postoperative ileus, reduces the length of intensive care and hospital stay [9] for patients undergoing cardiac procedures on cardiopulmonary bypass.
An analysis from a European registry determined that mortality prediction models for heart failure patients have relatively poor reliability and are not used often in clinical practice [10].