Tag Archives: Cardiology

Scientific Misconduct: From Darwin And Mendel To Poldermans And Matsubara Reply

by • People, Places & Events, Policy & Ethics • Tags: , , , , ,

Responding to recent episodes of scientific misconduct in cardiovascular research involving once prominent cardiovascular researchers, the editor of the European Heart Journal, Thomas Lüscher, has written an editorial discussing the significance of the new cases and placing them in a historical context that includes allegations of scientific misconduct by Mendel and Darwin, among many others.

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Poldermans was the first or the senior author in 7 papers published in EHJ. Lüscher writes that the chairman of the Poldermans investigative committee “made it clear that the vast amount of publications led by Poldermans over the last decades made it impossible to assess their scientific validity in all cases.” As a result, Poldermans announces that “the editors of the European Heart Journal therefore would like to make an expression of concern related to the papers where Poldermans was the responsible author.”

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Comment: Without more information there will continue to be a large cloud of uncertainty hanging over the cardiovascular literature. The statement of the chairman of the Poldermans committee bears repeating: “the vast amount of publications led by Poldermans over the last decades made it impossible to assess their scientific validity in all cases.”

 Click here to read the full story on Forbes.

 

Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel

 

Don Poldermans

 

 

 

 

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Are Most People With Complex Coronary Disease Getting The Best Treatment? 1

by • Interventional Cardiology & Surgery • Tags: , , , , , , ,

angiogram

The relative value of PCI (stents) and bypass surgery for the treatment of people with blocked coronary arteries has been a topic of intense interest and debate for more than a generation now. Over time, the less invasive and more patient-friendly (and less scary) PCI has become the more popular procedure, but the surgeons (who perform bypass surgery) and cardiologists (who perform the less invasive PCI) have argued furiously about which procedure is safest and will deliver the most benefit in specific patient populations. In general, the most complex cases require the more thorough revascularization provided by surgery, while the more simple cases do well with PCI and can therefore avoid the trauma of surgery. But the specific criteria have remained murky, and interventional cardiologists have aggressively sought to take on increasingly more complex cases.

Now, long term results from a highly influential trial comparing the two procedures offer what is likely the most definitive solution we are likely to have for a very long time. Five year results from the SYNTAX trial have now been published in the Lancet.

Here’s some of the perspective on this study from two very savvy cardiologists, Rick Lange and L. David Hillis. (These comments are extracted from their original publication in CardioExchange. Note that I work on CardioExchange, which is published by the New England Journal of Medicine.)

…The “bottom line” conclusions are:

  1. CABG should remain the standard of care for patients with complex lesions…
  2. For patients with 3-vessel disease considered to be less complex… PCI is an acceptable alternative.
  3. All the data from patients with complex multivessel CAD should be reviewed and discussed by a cardiac surgeon and an interventional cardiologist, after which consensus on optimal treatment can be reached.

But Lange and Hillis, while they seem to largely agree with the study findings, also cast doubt on whether most physicians are likely to pay attention to the study details. They wonder whether most hospitals actually live up to the standards in the study, which requires, for each patient, a review of each patient by the multidisciplinary heart team, and the calculation of a complex SYNTAX score to establish the precise degree of risk.

Okay, let’s be honest….

  1. In your hospital, in what percentage of patients with left main or 3 vessel CAD are all the data systematically reviewed and discussed by a “Heart Team”?
  2. Do you calculate SYNTAX on all patients with left main or 3 vessel disease, or do you usually just “guestimate” lesion complexity?

If Lange and Hillis’s suspicions are correct, many people with complex coronary lesions are not receiving the best possible care. Hmmm.

400 Patients Sue Kentucky Hospital and 11 Cardiologists Over Unnecessary Procedures Reply

by • Interventional Cardiology & Surgery, Policy & Ethics • Tags: , , , , , ,

After undergoing more than two dozen cardiac procedures over a period of twenty years at St. Joseph Hospital in London, Kentucky, a patient was told by an outside cardiologist in Lexington that a recent procedure had been performed unnecessarily on an artery that was barely blocked.

“I would have not carried out this procedure,” the cardiologist, Michael R. Jones, wrote in a letter to the patient. The story is recounted  in an article published on Sunday in USA Today and the Louisville Courier-Journal, about the latest and perhaps the biggest case yet to surface over unnecessary cardiac procedures.

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Comment: By sheer coincidence, on the same day, the New York Times published a news analysis by Barry Meier about the scandal over Johnson & Johnson’s hip implant. “Doctors Who Don’t Speak Out” focuses on the failure of physicians to report problems with devices and drugs, but clearly the issue has even larger implications. A quote from Harlan Krumholz in the story– “Questioning the status quo in medicine is not easy”– could easily apply to the many recent cases of egregious overuse of cardiac procedures and devices. Imagine how recent history might have been different if colleagues of  Sandesh Patil and Mark Midei had raised earlier questions about borderline procedures. Cardiologists and other physicians complain about the intrusive and burdensome role played by the legal system, regulators, and insurance companies, but they have only themselves to blame if they refuse to police their own ranks, and indeed tacitly participate in a system that provides lucrative compensation to high-volume proceduralists.

Click here to read the entire post on Forbes.

Kentucky

Should Radial Artery Access Be The Default Choice For PCI? Reply

by • Interventional Cardiology & Surgery • Tags: , , , ,

Over on CardioExchange six cardiologists, from fellows to senior faculty, talk about whether radial artery access should be the “default choice for PCI:

Megan Coylewright, MD, MPH (interventional fellow, Mayo Clinic): …radial PCI should be a part of every interventionalist’s toolkit…

Micah Eimer, MD (cardiologist, Glenview, IL): The data are pretty convincing on the lower rate of complications, and my clinicial experience confirms that. Patients who have undergone both radial and femoral approaches consistently and strongly prefer the radial approach…

L. David Hillis, MD, (Chair, Department of Internal Medicine) and Richard Lange, MD (Professor, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School): As old dogs (admittedly late in learning new tricks), we’re a part of “Gen-S” (“S” for Sones)… In Texas, where everything is bigger and better, we don’t feel a need to abandon the femoral approach.

Click here to read the entire discussion on CardioExchange.

2012 In Review: Social Media In Cardiology 5

by • Uncategorized • Tags: , , , , ,

For a whole variety of reasons most cardiologists are not really comfortable diving into social media. For some reason they’re more comfortable remaining poolside, reading Braunwald or the latest mini JACC or Circulation than writing a blog or interacting with each other or their patients on Facebook or Twitter. Most cardiologists who do get their feet wet send out a few isolated tweets or posts and then disappear into the great digital void. So here’s a special shout out to a few brave cardiologists who are at least making an effort (feel free to add to this list in the comments section):

twitter

Cardiologists Chris Cannon and Herb Aronow,  and cardiology fellow Michael Katz, regularly tweet about cardiology. Some big names like Harlan Krumholz and Bob Harrington are sporadic tweeters, providing behind the scene glimpses at events like a PCORI meeting or an ACC Board of Governors meeting. Electrophysiologist John Mandrola didn’t just get his feet wet but took a big belly dive into the social media pool, actively tweeting, blogging on his own and over at that other cardiology website, and contributing to newspapers and big sites like KevinMD. Eric Topol is a prolific tweeter, but he rarely seems interested in cardiology these days.

Jay Schloss deserves special mention for live-tweeting a closed Riata symposium and then keeping CardioBrief readers fully informed about each major development of this important case as it slowly unfolded this past year. Westby Fisher is the great grandfather of all cardiologists in the blogosphere and twitterverse, though lately he’s pulled back a bit, foolishly deciding that his medical practice and family life are somehow more important than his social media standing.

Finally, though he’s not a cardiologist, Lancet editor Richard Horton deserves special mention. He took to Twitter like a duck to water, though not everyone was so pleased by all his preening. As I wrote earlier this year, it was impossible not to be fascinated by the occasional glimpses he provided of the dark underside of medical publishing. He’s toned this down a lot lately, but on occasion he still has some amusing comments on the rivalry (real or imagined?) between his journal and the New England Journal of Medicine. But if you’re not interested in the politcs of the World Health Organization or the British medical establishment you may not want to follow him these days.

Late entries: