February 2024 News Roundup

Every month, Section Editor L.A. McKeown curates a roundup of recent news tidbits from journals and medical meetings around the globe.

Wellness visits and preventive health screenings for hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol, and cancers have not returned to prepandemic levels in the US, a cross-sectional study of nearly 90,000 adults shows. Writing in JAMA Health Forum, the researchers say these findings have major public health implications, including the potential to worsen already low rates of preventive services among racial and ethnic minority populations.

Following hospital discharge for an MI, only about 30% of Medicare beneficiaries have their low-density lipoprotein cholesterol measured within 90 days, according to a paper published in JACC: Advances.  Any efforts taken to increase LDL testing for these patients “should reach vulnerable populations including those of non-Hispanic Black race/ethnicity and those with low socioeconomic status to prevent widening health inequities,” the investigators write.

Video games that promote exercise may be more helpful than conventional approaches for preventing falls in elderly adults, a study published in Nature Medicine suggests. People aged 65 and older who were randomized to play an “exergame” that included step training on a specialized mat had 25% fewer falls at 1 year than those randomized to a control group who received an education booklet on healthy aging and fall prevention.

Advanced age, greater elevation of cardiac biomarkers, and more prevalent evidence of diastolic dysfunction and left ventricular hypertrophy are characteristics of patients with diabetic cardiomyopathy, according to baseline data from the ARISE-HF trial. Published in Cardiovascular Diabetology, the study is testing caficrestat (AT-001; Applied Therapeutics), a selective aldose reductase inhibitor, in these patients at high risk for progression to overt disease. The full ARISE-HF trial data are scheduled for presentation as a late-breaking trial at the upcoming American College of Cardiology Scientific Session.

In JACC: Case Reports, investigators describe the workup and management of a 36-year-old man with familial hypercholesterolemia and no significant medical history other than elevated lipids. Prior to genetic testing that revealed a mutation in the LDL receptor and six additional variants, the patient was presumed to have nongenetic-related hypercholesterolemia due to his initial LDL level of 152 mg/dL and no known atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease among any first-degree relatives.

For patients in their late 30s through mid-50s, coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring may serve as an independent predictor of CV events and death over the next 15 years, according to pooled data from the CARDIA and MESA studies. The CAC score was independently associated with incident CVD, coronary heart disease, and all-cause mortality in those with or without diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the researchers write in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

Compared with angiography-guided PCI, intravascular imaging with OCT or IVUS is associated with less target lesion failure, driven by a 45% reduction in cardiac death, 18% reduction in target-vessel MI, and a 28% reduction in TLR. The findings come from a network meta-analysis of nearly 16,000 patients published in the Lancet this month; the study was previously presented at the European Society of Cardiology 2023 Congress, as reported by TCTMD.

Long-term exposure to air pollution has been shown to be a risk factor for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in the United States and elsewhere, but now a new study suggests it also may elevate the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). Writing in the European Heart Journal, researchers say data from the UK Biobank further show that those with a genetic predisposition to AAA are at even greater risk when they’re also exposed to high levels of pollutants.

The WATCH-DM risk score, which calculates the risk of incident heart failure (HF) in the next 5 years in patients with diabetes, can be further improved by adding social determinants of health. In a study of US veterans published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, researchers found that when they recalibrated the score using the social deprivation index (SDI)—a metric based on seven factors related to poverty, education, housing type, access to transportation, unemployment, and the prevalence of single-parent households—the 5-year risk of HF hospitalization for those in the most-deprived group was more than twice that of the least-deprived group.

News Highlights From TCTMD:

Efforts to Up PCSK9 Use Still Falling Short, Analysis Finds

Women Gain More From Exercise Than Men—and Get Away With Less

PCI Radiation Reduction Intervention Scores Big in Michigan

Study IDs Patients Most Likely to Quit Smoking After ASCVD Event

Lengthy CPR for In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Tied to Worse Outcomes