Compared to heart failure patients with severe secondary mitral regurgitation who were treated with guideline-directed medical therapy alone, those randomized to a MitraClip procedure plus optimal medical therapy demonstrated relative reductions of 47 percent for heart failure hospitalizations and 38 percent for mortality at two years of follow-up.

A Journal of the American College of Cardiology study this week linked long-term alcohol consumption to adverse cardiac remodeling in patients who were initially young and healthy—something the paper’s authors said might be offset by drinking predominantly wine.

Heart failure patients who are discharged from the hospital before they reach euvolemia—a healthy balance of blood in the body—are more likely to be readmitted in both the short- and long-term, according to research published in the American Journal of Cardiology this month.

Hospice use in the U.S. has grown to nearly 5 percent among elderly patients with heart failure (HF), according to a JAMA Cardiology study published Aug. 29, but palliative care will likely become increasingly difficult as treatment continues to improve.

Less than two weeks after the FDA sent a warning letter to cardiologists about high mortality and stroke rates associated with SynCardia Systems’ Companion 2 (C2) Driver System, the company has published a response saying pre-implant risk factors were responsible for those outcomes.

Cardiac patients diagnosed with “broken heart syndrome” are twice as likely to run into clinical complications during treatment if they have a history of cancer, Italian researchers reported this week at the ESC Congress in Munich.

Research presented this week at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich suggests a new treatment may be emerging for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy—a condition previously thought to be rare and untreatable.

Oregon’s only heart transplant program has suspended operations for at least two weeks after three cardiologists either left or announced plans to leave Oregon Health & Science University, The Oregonian reported Aug. 27.