ABBOTT PARK, Ill., March 19, 2018 — Abbott today announced that the Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare (MHLW) in Japan granted national reimbursement for the company's MitraClip therapy to treat people with mitral regurgitation, a serious, progressive heart disease in which the mitral valve does not close properly, allowing blood to flow backward into the heart.

Canagliflozin reduced the risk of death or hospitalization for heart failure by 22 percent among patients with type 2 diabetes and a high risk of cardiovascular disease, according to results of the CANVAS trial presented March 11 at the American College of Cardiology’s scientific session and published simultaneously in Circulation.

Increased exposure to air pollution may contribute to the higher risk of heart disease found in the black population, researchers reported in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

Applying natural language learning and deep neural networks to mortality risk models could help predict cardiovascular outcomes with more accuracy than modern support vector machines, researchers said at the 67th annual American College of Cardiology conference in Orlando.

Surgical risk is an outdated measure of a patient’s eligibility for aortic valve replacement procedures, one Norfolk, Virginia, cardiologist said at the American College of Cardiology’s annual symposium last weekend—clinicians should instead be turning their attention to the idea of “TAVR suitability.”

At one hospital, an aggressive treatment PE treatment program has dramatically reduced mortality.

One morning last year, a patient checked into a hospital in Canada as the first TAVR case of the day, and they were discharge by that evening. It was an eyebrow-raising feat for a procedure that typically requires several days of hospitalization.

Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT) today announced new clinical data in interventional treatments for aortic and peripheral vascular diseases in a late-breaking trial session at Vascular Interventional Advances (VIVA) 2015.