The Mortality Burden of Untreated Aortic Stenosis.

BACKGROUND: The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines recommend the assessment and grading of severity of aortic stenosis (AS) as mild, moderate, or severe, per echocardiogram, and recommend aortic valve replacement (AVR) when the AS is severe. OBJECTIVES: The authors sought to describe mortality rates across the entire spectrum of untreated AS from a contemporary, large, real-world database. METHODS: We analyzed a deidentified real-world data set including 1,669,536 echocardiographic reports (1,085,850 patients) from 24 U.S. hospitals (egnite Database, egnite). Patients >18 years of age were classified by diagnosed AS severity. Untreated mortality and treatment rates were examined with Kaplan-Meier (KM) estimates, with results compared using the log-rank test. Multivariate hazards analysis was performed to assess associations with all-cause mortality. RESULTS: Among 595,120 patients with available AS severity assessment, the KM-estimated 4-year unadjusted, untreated, all-cause mortality associated with AS diagnosis of none, mild, mild-to-moderate, moderate, moderate-to-severe, or severe was 13.5% (95% CI: 13.3%-13.7%), 25.0% (95% CI: 23.8%-26.1%), 29.7% (95% CI: 26.8%-32.5%), 33.5% (95% CI: 31.0%-35.8%), 45.7% (95% CI: 37.4%-52.8%), and 44.9% (95% CI: 39.9%-49.6%), respectively. Results were similar when adjusted for informative censoring caused by treatment. KM-estimated 4-year observed treatment rates were 0.2% (95% CI: 0.2%-0.2%), 1.0% (95% CI: 0.7%-1.3%), 4.2% (95% CI: 2.0%-6.3%), 11.4% (95% CI: 9.5%-13.3%), 36.7% (95% CI: 31.8%-41.2%), and 60.7% (95% CI: 58.0%-63.3%), respectively. After adjustment, all degrees of AS severity were associated with increased mortality. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with AS have high mortality risk across all levels of untreated AS severity. Aortic valve replacement rates remain low for patients with severe AS, suggesting that more research is needed to understand barriers to diagnosis and appropriate approach and timing for aortic valve replacement.

Design and rationale of the XIENCE short DAPT clinical program: An assessment of the safety of 3-month and 1-month DAPT in patients at high bleeding risk undergoing PCI with an everolimus-eluting stent.

Dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) is key for the prevention of recurrent ischemic events after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI); however, it increases the risk of bleeding complications. While new generation drug-eluting stents have been shown superior to bare-metal stents after a short DAPT course, the optimal DAPT duration in patients at high bleeding risk (HBR) remains to be determined. TRIAL DESIGN: The XIENCE Short DAPT program consists of three prospective, single-arm studies (XIENCE 90, XIENCE 28 Global and XIENCE 28 USA) investigating 3- or 1-month DAPT durations in HBR patients undergoing PCI with the XIENCE stent. The XIENCE 90 study is being conducted in the US and enrolled 2047 subjects who discontinued DAPT at 3 months if they were free from myocardial infarction (MI), repeat coronary revascularization, stroke, or stent thrombosis. The XIENCE 28 program includes the USA study, enrolling 642 patients in US and Canada, and the Global study, enrolling 963 patients in Europe and Asia. In XIENCE 28, patients were to discontinue DAPT at 1 month post-PCI if event-free. The primary hypothesis for both XIENCE 90 and XIENCE 28 is that a short DAPT regimen will be non-inferior to a conventional DAPT duration with respect to the composite of all-cause death or MI. Patients enrolled in the prospective multicenter post-market XIENCE V USA study will be used as historical control group in a stratified propensity-adjusted analysis. CONCLUSIONS: The XIENCE Short DAPT Program will provide insights into the safety and efficacy of 2 abbreviated DAPT regimens of 3- and 1-month duration in a large cohort of HBR patients undergoing PCI with the XIENCE stent.

Three-dimensional echocardiographic assessment of patent foramen ovale in platypnea-orthodeoxia.

Platypnea-orthodeoxia is an uncommon syndrome characterized by positional dyspnea and hypoxia when upright that improves with lying down. We present a 75-year-old man with platypnea-orthodeoxia in the setting of a patent foramen ovale (PFO) and a 2.1 cm highly mobile atrial septal aneurysm with 2 cm bowing. Prior reports have established the use of three-dimensional echocardiography to facilitate percutaneous closure of PFO and atrial septal defect, but its use in patients with platypnea-orthodeoxia is unclear. We document three-dimensional echocardiographic images that accurately estimated PFO defect size and confirmed placement of the occluder device.

Bivalirudin in acute coronary syndromes and percutaneous coronary intervention.

The standard of care for patients with acute coronary syndrome is antithrombotic and antiplatelet therapies along with early percutaneous coronary intervention. Because of the limitations of heparin, there has been an interest in direct thrombin inhibitors, such as bivalirudin, which is now the anticoagulant of choice in percutaneous coronary intervention.