Journal of Invasive Cardiology

Dear Readers,

The goal of the Journal of Invasive Cardiology is to provide state-of-the-art information that will support clinicians in the effective management of patients with cardiovascular disease. There are many selections in this issue that I hope readers will find useful in their clinical practice to promote more effective treatment of cardiovascular disease patients. 

This month, we introduce a new column where timely and sometimes controversial topics will be discussed. This month’s contribution to Invasive Thoughts was written by Srihari S. Naidu, MD, Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, Interventional Cardiology Fellowship Program and Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Treatment Center at Winthrop University Hospital on Long Island, and Associate Professor of Medicine at SUNY – Stony Brook School of Medicine. Dr. Naidu writes about the challenges facing physicians as they attempt to maintain their position as patient advocates amidst the myriad pressures to contain costs that are particularly focused on cardiology.

In the first original research article, Dr Louis Miller and colleagues from the VA New York Harbor Health Care System, New York Campus and New York University School of Medicine in New York report on their research study looking at very long clinical follow-up after fractional flow reserve-guided coronary revascularization. In the next research selection, Dr Michael Lee from UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, Kyung Woo Park from Seoul National University Hospital in Seoul and collaborators from centers in Korea and the United States present the results of their multicenter international registry of unprotected left main coronary artery PCI with everolimus-eluting stents. Next, Dr Armando Pérez de Prado and colleagues from Fundación Investigacion Sanitaria en León – HemoLeon and Institute of Biomedicine in León, Spain report on their animal study of vasomotor response to different endothelium-dependent vasodilators. Dr Mauro Maioli from the Division of Cardiology at Prato Hospital in Prato, Italy and colleagues from institutions in Europe and the United States present their analysis of the impact of preprocedural TIMI flow on myocardial perfusion, distal embolization, and mortality in patients with STEMI treated with primary angioplasty and GP IIb/IIIa inhibitors. 

In the next selection, Dr Dale Tavris from the US Food and Drug Administration and collaborators from Yale University, University of Colorado at Boulder, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the American College of Cardiology in Washington, D.C. present their study evaluating hemostasis strategies and their effects on bleeding and vascular complications at the femoral access site following PCI. Dr Sajid Dhakam and colleagues from the Section of Cardiology, Department of Medicine and the Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan report on the safety and efficacy of drug-eluting balloons in the treatment of drug-eluting in-stent restenosis.