Potent P2Y receptor antagonists have been used widely for patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention with different results. Benefits from different regimens various between trials. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have restrictive inclusion and exclusion criteria; thus, they may limit the generalizability of the findings to a broader population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is an important indicator of patient's satisfaction about their disease course. Many factors are influential to life quality, such as dignity and resilience. Dignity is mostly explored in populations with cancer, but the understanding of dignity and its relationship with resilience and HRQoL is limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMagnetic order in most materials occurs when magnetic ions with finite moments arrange in a particular pattern below the ordering temperature. Intriguingly, if the crystal electric field (CEF) effect results in a spin-singlet ground state, a magnetic order can still occur due to the exchange interactions between neighboring ions admixing the excited CEF levels. The magnetic excitations in such a state are spin excitons generally dispersionless in reciprocal space.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeripheral artery disease (PAD) imposes a heavy burden of major adverse cardiovascular events that are associated with considerable mortality and morbidity, and major adverse limb events (e.g., thrombectomy, revascularization, amputation) that can substantially impact patients' daily functioning and quality of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Proximal protection devices, such as the Mo.Ma system provides better neurological outcomes than the distal filter system in the carotid artery stenting (CAS) procedure. This study first evaluated the safety and efficacy of the Mo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe recommended maintenance dose of prasugrel for East Asian populations (i.e., Japanese and Taiwanese) is 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPulmonary embolism (PE) is a potential life-threatening condition and risk-adapted diagnostic and therapeutic management conveys a favorable outcome. For patients at high risk for early complications and mortality, prompt exclusion or confirmation of PE by imaging is the key step to initiate and facilitate reperfusion treatment. Among patients with hemodynamic instability, systemic thrombolysis improves survival, whereas surgical embolectomy or percutaneous intervention are alternatives in experienced hands in scenarios where systemic thrombolysis is not the best preferred thromboreduction measure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous studies have shown that the use of fractional flow reserve (FFR) in addition to angiography significantly reduced the rate of all major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE). However, this practice has not been widely accepted and limited outcome data exist about FFR-guided percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in Taiwan. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the possible impact of FFR-guided PCI in coronary stenoses of intermediate severity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe microscopic mechanism governing the zero-resistance flow of current in some iron-based, high-temperature superconducting materials is not well understood up to now. A central issue concerning the investigation of these materials is their superconducting gap symmetry and structure. Here we present a combined study of low-temperature specific heat and scanning tunnelling microscopy measurements on single crystalline FeSe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is a potentially catastrophic condition because thrombosis, left untreated, can result in detrimental pulmonary embolism. Yet in the absence of thrombosis, anticoagulation increases the risk of bleeding. In the existing literature, knowledge about the epidemiology of DVT is primarily based on investigations among Caucasian populations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Although radial access for drug-eluting stent (DES) combined with rotational atherectomy (RA) in patients with calcified coronary lesions may be associated with a lower risk of major bleeding complications and obtain favorable clinical results compared with femoral access, the long-term outcome data of this approach were limited in contemporary DES era.
Methods & Results: This retrospective study sought to compare in-hospital and long-term outcomes for patients undergoing RA via the transradial (TR) and transfemoral (TF) route in 126 consecutive patients (59 radial, 67 femoral) from 2009 to 2014. TR RA procedures were performed in 44/62 (71%) by the three TR operators, compared with 15/64 (23%) by the four TF operators in the present study.