The use of paclitaxel-coated balloons and stents in the femoropopliteal arteries of patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD) was associated with relative mortality increases of 68 percent and 93 percent at two and five years of follow-up, respectively, according to a meta-analysis published Dec. 6 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a stem cell-based test to determine whether genetic variants in heart muscle cells are benign or pathogenic. In other words, they’ve added some certainty to variants of uncertain significance—the tricky alleles that can either contribute to the development of diseases or be completely harmless.

Hospitals with favorable outcomes for surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) procedures subsequently see better transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) outcomes when they launch TAVR programs, researchers reported in JAMA Cardiology Dec. 5, suggesting the quality of an institution’s surgical team could be an indicator of how they’ll fare after they initiate TAVR.

Receiving the flu vaccine could improve cardiovascular and all-cause mortality outcomes in patients with heart failure, according to a large-scale study of Danish citizens published Dec. 10 in Circulation.

About 1 in 8 patients who received endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) for acute ischemic stroke during a two-year period in the U.S. were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, according to an analysis of the Nationwide Readmissions Database published in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

One MI survivor is raising awareness for heart attack symptoms in women after her Dec. 9 tweets about an unusual episode went viral.

Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) is cost-saving across nearly all age groups, regardless of whether patients are found to have hypertension on the initial screening, according to a study published in Hypertension.

Patients who present to the hospital with cardiogenic shock (CS) and are treated with an intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) are more likely to survive if the device is implanted within an hour of CS onset, according to research published in the American Journal of Cardiology Dec. 4.