Under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, a blueprint for global well-being penned in 2015, officials aim to end all preventable deaths in newborns and children under 5 by 2030. And to Jackie Boucher, MS, BS, president of Children’s HealthLink in Minneapolis, that means better understanding congenital heart disease (CHD).

A miniature pacemaker developed for use in infants and those with limited vascular access has passed a proof-of-concept simulation and is entering its second phase of testing, researchers from Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., have reported.

Antibiotic prescriptions to prevent infective endocarditis (IE) decreased following a 2007 guideline update from the American Heart Association—even among high-risk patients for whom antibiotics were still recommended. Those patients showed an estimated 177 percent increase in IE incidence over the next several years, according to a new study.

Eight European scientific societies joined forces to produce what they say is the first interdisciplinary position paper to help clinicians manage patients with patent foramen ovales (PFOs).

Hospitals offering transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) tend to produce the best survival outcomes when both TAVR and surgical AVR (SAVR) caseloads remain high, according to a study published Oct. 31 in JAMA Cardiology.

Kidney dialysis is an independent predictor of mortality in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients undergoing transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), according to a seven-year trial of 2,000 men and women in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Intermediate-risk transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) patients see fewer strokes, deaths and encephalopathies than those who undergo surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR), researchers reported in the Oct. 30 edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.