AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – In patients with atrial fibrillation, delayed enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (DE-MRI) performed before ablative treatment can stage the degree of damaged heart tissue (atrial fibrosis) and help predict whether treatment will be successful or not, according to results of Delayed Enhancement - MRI determinant of successful Catheter Ablation of Atrial Fibrillation (DECAAF) trial. "The DECAAF results show that stage of atrial fibrosis prior to ablation is a new, powerful, independent predictor of outcome," said lead investigator Nasir ...

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – In the treatment of venous thromboembolism (VTE), the oral anticoagulant edoxaban resulted in equal efficacy and better safety compared to standard warfarin when either drug was used with initial low molecular weight heparin (LMWH), according to the results of the Hokusai-VTE trial. In the landscape of new trials with oral anticoagulants, the Hokusai-VTE findings offer fresh insight into a previously under-represented subgroup of patients with pulmonary embolism (PE), suggesting that treatment for this group might need to be different than ...

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands -- Aspiration of the blood clot or "thrombus" that causes a heart attack before re-opening a patient's artery with a balloon catheter does not improve survival compared to performing balloon dilation and stenting alone according to the results of the Thrombus Aspiration in ST- Elevation myocardial infarction in Scandinavia (TASTE) trial. "We believe that TASTE questions the usefulness of thrombus aspiration as a routine adjunct and the recommendation for its general use in international guidelines should probably be down-graded," said lead author ...

Dr Lin said: "Statins are widely used in the older population to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. But recent reports of statin-associated cognitive impairment have led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to list statin-induced cognitive changes, especially for the older population, in its safety communications." He added: "Previous studies had considered statin therapy to exert a beneficial effect on dementia. But few large-scale studies have focused on the impact of statins on new-onset, non-vascular dementia in the geriatric population." Accordingly, ...

Dr Gitt said: "There are wide variations between European countries in the achievement of LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C) targets. However the effect of different reimbursement systems on meeting the targets was unknown." Between June 2008 and February 2009 DYSIS assessed the prevalence and types of persistent lipid abnormalities in patients receiving statins. Eligible patients were at high risk of a cardiovascular event, aged >45 years, and had been on chronic statin treatment for at least three months. A total of 22,063 patients were enrolled from 2,954 sites across 11 European ...

Dr Nakano said: "Many randomised clinical trials, such as Treating to New Targets (TNT) and PROVE IT-TIMI, have shown that aggressive cholesterol lowering with statins improves clinical outcomes in patients with CAD and high LDL-C levels.1,2 But until now it was not known whether aggressive lipid lowering with statins would also benefit CAD patients with very low LDL-C levels." The current study used the Ibaraki Cardiovascular Assessment Study (ICAS), a registry of 2,238 patients from 12 hospitals in the Ibaraki region of Japan, who between 0 and 1 month underwent percutaneous ...

Dr Benn Christiansen said: "We know that atrial fibrillation increases the risk of ischemic stroke. And in patients with atrial fibrillation or previous ischemic stroke, the risk of stroke increases with the number of risk factors. But until now, little attention has been paid to the association between stroke risk and risk factors in patients without prior stroke or atrial fibrillation. We wanted to explore that association and to quantify if stroke risk was of comparable size in patients with numerous risk factors." The study included 4,198,119 people aged 18 to 90 ...

Stroke is the second cause of death worldwide. Atrial fibrillation is the most common clinically relevant cardiac arrhythmia in Europe, affecting approximately 1.5-2% of the general population.1 Prevalence is estimated to double in the next 50 years as the population ages. Patients with atrial fibrillation have a five-fold increased risk of ischaemic stroke even though around 30% have no symptoms. As blood is less adequately shifted from the heart during atrial fibrillation, blood clots can form and cause large ischaemic strokes. Strokes that occur in association with ...

In contrast, a CHA2DS2-VASc score of 0 identifies a subgroup of patients with very low stroke risk unlikely to benefit from anticoagulation treatment. Professor Nabauer said: "AF is the most frequent cardiac arrhythmia requiring hospitalisation and has a 1-2% prevalence in the general population. AF is associated with a significant risk of stroke with frequently disabling consequences. While oral anticoagulation is very effective in preventing ischaemic strokes in AF, it increases bleeding risk. Identification of patients with low risk of stroke not requiring oral anticoagulation ...

Cataracts are the leading cause of visual impairment worldwide affecting more than 20 million people. Statins are among the most commonly prescribed medications. In the USA they are prescribed to 1 in 3 people over 45 years of age at a cost of $35 billion annually. Professor Kostis said: "There is persistent concern among physicians and other health care providers about the possible cataractogenicity of statins.1 We therefore investigated the relationship of statins and cataracts in a meta-analysis of 14 studies selected after detailed review of the medical literature. ...

The findings were presented at the ESC Congress today by Ms Stina Jakobsson from Sweden. They reveal that reperfusion therapy and secondary prevention drugs produced the decline and brought stroke risk after AMI closer to that of non-diabetics. Ms Jakobsson said: "Ischemic stroke following an acute myocardial infarction is a fairly uncommon but devastating event with high mortality. It has long been recognized that patients with diabetes mellitus are at a particularly high risk of complications after an AMI but until now, the risk of ischemic stroke after an AMI in patients ...

Dr Dohi said: "Smokers are twice as likely to have a heart attack as people who have never smoked. Quitting smoking is the most important thing people can do to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. But until now, studies have not examined whether the increased risk caused by smoking is completely reversed after smoking cessation." The current study investigated how the vascular system is altered by smoking and whether the changes can be normalised by smoking cessation. The researchers focused on the effects of smoking and smoking cessation on arterial endothelial ...

Dr Emberson said: "Despite recent declines in the numbers of people smoking and tar yields of cigarettes, smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in Europe." He added: "Previous studies had demonstrated that prolonged cigarette smoking from early adult life was associated with about 10 years loss of life expectancy, with about one quarter of smokers killed by their habit before the age of 70. Stopping at ages 60, 50, 40 or 30 years gained back about 3, 6, 9 or the full 10 years. However, the hazards of continuing to smoke and the benefits of stopping in ...

Second-hand smoke increases the risk of coronary artery disease and acute myocardial infarction. For this reason, health policies aimed at reducing tobacco consumption and public smoke exposure are strongly recommended. Dr Porretta said: "Canton Ticino (CT), which is one of the 26 cantons of the Swiss Federation, was the first Swiss canton to introduce a smoking ban in April 2007. We had the opportunity to assess the long-term impact of the smoking ban on the incidence of ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and to compare STEMI epidemiology with Canton ...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Saturday 31 August 2013: General practitioners (GPs) undertreat women with atrial fibrillation (AF), according to research presented at ESC Congress 2013 today by Dr Pierre Sabouret from France. The analysis of more than 15,000 patients showed that women were undertreated with antithrombotic medications compared to men regardless of their stroke risk and comorbidities. Dr Sabouret said: "Gender-related differences among outpatients with stable coronary artery disease are well known.1-6 Heart diseases are one of the most important causes of ...

DARIEN, IL – A new brain imaging study may help explain why people with insomnia often complain that they struggle to concentrate during the day even when objective evidence of a cognitive problem is lacking. "We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off 'mind-wandering' brain regions irrelevant to the task," said lead author Sean P.A. Drummond, PhD, associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study finds that sleep deprivation affects facial features such as the eyes, mouth and skin, and these features function as cues of sleep loss to other people. Results show that the faces of sleep-deprived individuals were perceived as having more hanging eyelids, redder eyes, more swollen eyes and darker circles under the eyes. Sleep deprivation also was associated with paler skin, more wrinkles or fine lines, and more droopy corners of the mouth. People also looked sadder when sleep-deprived than after normal sleep, and sadness was related to looking ...

BURLINGTON, Vt., August 30, 2013 – In the 1970s, red spruce was the forest equivalent of a canary in the coal mine, signaling that acid rain was damaging forests and that some species, especially red spruce, were particularly sensitive to this human induced damage. In the course of studying the lingering effects of acid rain and whether trees stored less carbon as a result of winter injury, U.S. Forest Service and University of Vermont scientists came up with a surprising result – three decades later, the canary is feeling much better. Decline in red spruce has been attributed ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (08/30/2013) – A University of Minnesota research team featuring researchers from the Institute for Molecular Virology, School of Dentistry and Center for Drug Design has developed a new delivery system for a combination of two FDA approved drugs that may serve as an effective treatment for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The discovery, which allows for a combination of decitabine and gemcitabine to be delivered in pill form, marks a major step forward in patient feasibility for the drugs, which previously had been available solely via injection ...

People are now used to long-term weather forecasts that predict what the coming winter may bring. But University of Washington researchers and federal scientists have developed the first long-term forecast of conditions that matter for Pacific Northwest fisheries. "Being able to predict future phytoplankton blooms, ocean temperatures and low-oxygen events could help fisheries managers," said Samantha Siedlecki, a research scientist at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean. "This is an experiment to produce the first seasonal prediction ...

In work published this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health, led by Associate Professor Giles Duffield and Assistant Professor Zain Syed of the Department of Biological Sciences, revealed that the major malaria vector in Africa, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, is able to smell major human host odorants better at night. The study reports an integrative approach to examine the mosquito's ability to smell across the 24-hour day and involved proteomic, sensory physiological, and behavioral ...

This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust resembles a caterpillar on its way to a feast. But the meat of the story is not only what this cosmic caterpillar eats for lunch, but also what's eating it. Harsh winds from extremely bright stars are blasting ultraviolet radiation at this "wanna-be" star and sculpting the gas and dust into its long shape. The culprits are 65 of the hottest, brightest known stars, classified as O-type stars, located 15 light-years away from the knot, towards the right edge of the image. These stars, along with 500 less bright, but ...

The Wallow Fire burned over 500,000 acres, making it the largest fire in Arizona history, to date. It is one of many large fires that fire managers and researchers have seen scorch forests nationwide since the early 2000s. "We have entered a new era where we're definitely seeing higher fire activity," said Philip Dennison, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. With busy fire seasons, scientists and fire managers are interested in how and why fire frequency, severity and duration changes over time. To help investigate these trends, the U.S. Forest ...

Sea-level rise (SLR) has been isolated as a principal cause of coastal erosion in Hawaii. Differing rates of relative sea-level rise on the islands of Oahu and Maui, Hawaii remain as the best explanation for the difference in island-wide shoreline trends (that is, beach erosion or accretion) after examining other influences on shoreline change including waves, sediment supply and littoral processes, and anthropogenic changes. Researchers from the University of Hawaii – Manoa (UHM), School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and the State of Hawaii, Department ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– If the idea of hookworms makes you shudder, consider this: Those pesky intestinal parasites may actually help your body ward off other infections, and perhaps even prevent autoimmune and other diseases. Studying members of the Tsimane, an indigenous population in the lowlands of Central Bolivia, UC Santa Barbara anthropologists Aaron Blackwell and Michael Gurven found that individuals infected by helminths –– parasitic worms –– were less likely than their counterparts to suffer from giardia, an intestinal malady caused by a flagellated protozoa. ...