Injectable ionic hydrogel conductors: Advancing material design to transform cardiac pacing.

Direct pacing of the mid myocardium where re-entry originates can be used to prevent ventricular arrhythmias and circumvent the need for painful defibrillation or cardiac ablation. However, there are no pacing electrodes small enough to navigate the coronary veins that cross these culprit scar regions. To address this need, we have developed an injectable ionically conductive hydrogel electrode that can fill the epicardial coronary veins and transform them into flexible electrodes.

Procalcitonin-guided duration of antibiotic treatment in children hospitalised with confirmed or suspected bacterial infection in the UK (BATCH): a pragmatic, multicentre, open-label, two-arm, individually randomised, controlled trial.

Background: Procalcitonin is a rapid response biomarker specific for bacterial infection, which is not routinely used in the UK National Health Service. We aimed to assess whether using a procalcitonin-guided algorithm would safely reduce the duration of antibiotic therapy compared with usual care, in which C-reactive protein is the commonly used biomarker.

Methods: The BATCH trial was a pragmatic, multicentre, open-label, parallel, two-arm, individually randomised, controlled trial conducted in 15 hospitals in England and Wales.

Association between the proportionality of functional mitral regurgitation and survival after mitral valve operation.

Objective: The concept of proportionate and disproportionate functional mitral regurgitation suggests that transcatheter edge-to-edge mitral repair may benefit patients with a smaller left ventricle relative to a higher regurgitant burden. The clinical relevance of proportionality remains unknown in mitral operations for ischemic mitral regurgitation. We aimed to characterize the association between mitral regurgitation proportionality and outcomes after mitral valve operations.

Comparison of Outcomes Between Low-Risk Aortic Valve Replacement Trials and a Surgical Registry.

Importance: It remains unknown whether outcomes of the Placement of Aortic Transcatheter Valves 3 (PARTNER 3) and Evolut Low Risk trials are comparable with surgical outcomes in nontrial settings, considering the added risk of concomitant cardiac operations.

Objective: To compare 30-day mortality and stroke incidences of patients in the surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) arm of low-risk trials with those of similar patients in the US Society of Thoracic Surgeons Adult Cardiac Surgery Database (STS ACSD).

Design, Setting, And Participants: A cross-sectional sampling study was conducted of adults in the STS ACSD with severe aortic stenosis at low surgical risk for AVR who underwent SAVR during the years low-risk AVR trials (PARTNER 3 and Evolut Low Risk) were enrolling (calendar years 2016-2018).

contributes to the virulence of in a murine model of Lyme disease.

, the Lyme disease pathogen, continuously changes its gene expression profile in order to adapt to ticks and mammalian hosts. The alternative sigma factor RpoS plays a central role in borrelial host adaptation. Global transcriptome analyses suggested that more than 100 genes might be regulated by RpoS, but the main part of the regulon remains unexplored.