A study from one of the largest public health systems in the country has found that African American patients experienced significantly worse outcomes after angioplasty and stenting, are at higher risk percutaneous coronary intervention than patients of other races, though researchers are not sure why.

An easily implementable technique to avoid reblockage of arteries that have been cleared through angioplasty and stent insertion has been developed by researchers led by Prof. Boris Rubinsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hispanic patients were 57 percent less likely than Caucasian patients to undergo coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) one year after successful angioplasty, a type of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to open blockages in the coronary arteries.

1 year results from landmark HORIZONS AMI trial: Use of bivalirudin is shown to improve survival compared to standard drug therapy for heart attack patients following angioplasty

UCSF researchers investigating the appropriate use of procedures to open narrowed coronary arteries -- such as angioplasty and stenting -- found that less than half of Medicare patients had documented noninvasive stress testing prior to elective percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI, the clinical name for such procedures.

Women, the elderly, and patients admitted to the emergency department on weekends are all less likely to receive same-day coronary angioplasty for a life-threatening heart attack in Florida, University of South Florida researchers found. Their study was published this month in the American Journal of Cardiology.

Study led by Gregg W. Stone, professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center/NewYork-Presbyterian and chairman of Cardiovascular Research Foundation, has shown that heart attack patients who were administered direct thrombin inhibitor bivalirudin during primary angioplasty had reduced rate of adverse clinical events, lower rate of major bleeding, and lower mortality rate than those who were treated with regimen of heparin and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors (GPI).

In a comparison of anticoagulants and stents for use with angioplasty following a heart attack, the anticoagulants abciximab and tirofiban had similar outcomes for some cardiac measures within 90 minutes after the procedure, while patients who received stents that released the drug sirolimus had a lower risk of major adverse cardiac events within 8 months than patients who received uncoated stents, according to a JAMA study being released early online March 30.

In a subset of patients suffering heart attack, adding stents to clot-busting medical therapy after the optimal treatment window ends isn't justified, say researchers from Duke University Medical Center.

Research will be reported at TCT 2007, the annual scientific symposium of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), that demonstrates that early intervention saves lives in women who have a heart attack or unstable chest pain.

In lifesaving procedures to open blocked heart arteries a key question has persisted for years: Is use of the more expensive drug, abciximab, justified over use of the less-expensive eptifibatide"

Compared with their counterparts a decade ago, today’s heart attack patients are receiving emergency angioplasty or clot-busting drugs to re-open clogged arteries at a far greater rate, but 10 percent of patients who could benefit from this life-saving treatment still do not receive it, according to a study published in The American Journal of Medicine by Yale and University of Michigan researchers.