Critical appraisal of cardiology guidelines on revascularisation: clinical practice.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) provides clinicians with beneficial information. Nonetheless, study findings are often arbitrary, speculative or provisional. The current state of misleading evidence exists in all applications, including those for guideline recommendations.

Analysis of safety outcomes for radial versus femoral access for percutaneous coronary intervention from a large clinical registry.

Objective: Using a multisite, contemporary registry of 58 862 percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures in a national healthcare system, the present study compared radial access with femoral access on safety and efficacy outcomes.

Methods: This is a real-world, large-scale, retrospective study using clinical data from a 137-hopsital System and reported to a multisite clinical registry. All patients undergoing a cardiac catheterisation procedure were included in this database.

Validity of a PCI Bleeding Risk Score in patient subsets stratified for body mass index.

Objective: An accurate tool with good discriminative for bleeding would be useful to clinicians for improved management of all their patients. Bleeding risk models have been published but not externally validated in independent clinical data set. We chose the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) score to validate within a large, multisite community data set.

The effect of bivalirudin and closure device on bleeding outcomes after percutaneous coronary interventions.

Introduction: Studies have demonstrated bivalirudin efficacy in some patients at increased risk of bleeding. The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which bleeding reduction is achieved among all patients using bivalirudin as compared with a heparin with or without 2B3A inhibitor strategy.

Methods: This is a real-world, large-scale retrospective study utilising the American College of Cardiology (ACC) data from a 37-hospital Ascension Health System.

Injecting lubricant into the guiding catheter enables stent deployment.

The majority of percutaneous artery interventional failures is due to the inability to deploy stents in patients with tortuous arteries, fibrotic lesions and/or calcified plaque. Recent reports of lubricant-facilitated stent delivery have described the use of either dipping the stent into solution or applying the solution to the stent surface prior to insertion into the guiding catheter. This report demonstrates that injection of undiluted RotaGlide into the guiding catheter can better facilitate stent delivery into patients.