A very brief editorial on frailty as a risk factor. In the time of weighing transcatheter interventions versus variable access surgical options, quantifying this physiological concept is of major importance for the cardiac teams and, importantly, the autonomy of the patient.
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Basic science
January 8, 2018
A refreshing brief editorial comment on hydrohemodynamics on the occasion of critiquing a manuscript on related echocardiographic computations in neonates. The focus is on the Laplacean principles of compliance/elastance applied to the left ventricle.
January 5, 2018
A large cadaveric study of the scalloping of normal mitral valve leaflets. As the accompanying editorial points out, it would be useful to correlate the cadaveric observations to imaging and surgical anatomy.
January 3, 2018
Video and a readable digest of a talk in a Harvard meeting, especially interesting in its scepticism on prevention.
December 21, 2017
Interesting to read the mortality and renal morbidity of PCI after serious MI. The choice of dual primary outcome may have been an afterhought....
December 15, 2017
Erythropoietin (EPO) signaling is an important component of neuroprotection in ischemic reperfusion injury following aortic surgery. EPO also induces hematopoiesis, a fact that has limited its clinical usefulness for treating spinal cord ischemia after aortic surgery.
November 16, 2017
The incoming issue of the Journal comes with an interesting group of papers revolving around a provocative topic: work from Seattle on the absence of predictive value of standard pulmonary function tests in LVAD surgery. Vivek Rao takes the opportunity to present his thoughts in this brief editorial, the important central message of which cannot be
October 30, 2017
A detailed review of the pericardial sinuses on the occasion of discovery of a unilateral pericardial fold caudal to Marshall's ligament. The significance of the structure is discussed as an operating surgical note to ipsilateral pericardial traction/ elevation in beating heart surgery.
October 18, 2017
The authors report the non-intuitive finding that blood from female donors who had ever been pregnant was associated with increased mortality among male recipients (HR 1.13). If validated by other studies, might this substantially complicate matching donated blood with appropriate recipients? Clearly the underlying mechanism will be interesting to
October 13, 2017
Patient Care