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The American Heart Association reports that strokes can occur not only in the brain but also in other parts of the body, including the eye, which is known as central retinal artery occlusion, or CRAO. This type of stroke is marked by a sudden and total vision loss in one eye, and is caused by a buildup of plaque in a carotid artery, the main arteries on each side of the neck that send blood to the brain and eyes, breaks loose and travels to the retina.

Cardiologists at UC Davis Medical Center have successfully completed their first transcatheter tricuspid valve replacement (TTVR) procedure, marking them as the first hospital in the Sacramento region to perform the minimally invasive treatment. This procedure treats tricuspid regurgitation, which is a condition where the tricuspid valve of the heart cannot close completely, leading to blood leaking backwards into the atrium from this faulty valve, and requiring the heart to pump harder to resist this leak.

Cardiologists William O'Neill, M.D. and Khaldoon Alaswad, M.D. of Henry Ford Health re-engineer a former mainstay of therapy for coronary artery disease with throwback operation of coronary bypass. This revolutionary reinvention of this bypass operation originated in the 1950s opens the door for non-surgical treatment for the many patients who are unable to withstand stents or open-heart revascularization procedures.

Abbott announces FDA clearance of its insertable cardiac monitor for diagnosis and evaluation of irregular heartbeats. The monitor, called Assert-IQ, boasts an impressive battery length spanning between three and six years depending on the specific diagnostic monitoring plan deployed by the system.

A report from the American Heart Association, recently published in the journal Stroke, highlights the critical importance of fixing racial inequities in stroke care, such as social determinants of health affecting stroke incidence, care, and outcomes. For strokes especially, speedy treatment is a key component in reducing the lasting effects of a stroke resulting from a blood clot, alongside answering access and cost concerns surrounding the medications utilized to quickly dissolve the problematic clot.

Hallmarks of cardiovascular ageing

Pathologies involving the circulatory system are collectively the leading cause of global morbidity, disability, and morality. Understanding cardiovascular ageing may be a key determinant of health expectancy and is thus of particular interest in the cardiology field. In this study, published by Nature Reviews Cardiology, eight molecular hallmarks are targeted as common denominators involved in cardiovascular ageing.

Key takeaways

• The eight molecular hallmarks covered in this review are disabled macroautophagy, loss of proteostasis, genomic instability, epigenetic alterations, mitochondrial dysfunction, cell senescence, dysregulated neurohormonal signalling and inflammation.
  
  
• The hallmarks of cardiovascular ageing are strongly intertwined, and accentuation or attenuation of individual hallmarks affects most, if not all, the others.
  
  
• Targeting the hallmarks of cardiovascular ageing holds promise for the treatment of major cardiovascular disorders and to reduce residual cardiovascular risk beyond the management of conventional risk factors.
  

Figure 1 (above) by the digits

• 2–5 mice per group.
  
  
• 1–3 months, 18–21 months and 24–30 months: mice ages for various cell types in the heart and aorta.
  
  
• 7–10 donor human hearts per group subjected to single-nucleus RNA sequencing analysis.
  
  
• 11–39 years, 44–60 years or 61–75 years: age of donor human hearts.

Stanford Medicine-led research determines that heart shape based on sphericity – or roundness - can predict future cardiac disease. This A.I.-assisted study concluded that intrinsic disease of the heart muscle not caused during a heart attack triggered sphericity in the left ventricle, which is the heart’s main mechanical heavy lifter regarding pumping blood throughout the body.

Researchers from Emory University have highlighted a recent rise in deaths from diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. Understanding the dire consequences of both diabetes and cardiovascular disease, the Emory group performed an epidemiological analysis to uncover the scale of the risk at hand and found that diabetes can double or even quadruple the risk of cardiovascular events in patients.

A machine learning model has achieved an improved ability to predict the mortality risks for patients undergoing cardiac surgery compared to the standard population-derived models. This study, which observed 6,392 patients, found consistent accuracy across five different surgery types included in the research.

A new study raises alarms surrounding the use of donor hearts with active Covid-19 infection for heart transplant procedures. Heart transplant recipients linked to donors with active Covid-19 had both a higher risk of dying at six month and one-year intervals post-surgery when compared to recipients from donors with without Covid-19 or recently resolved infection.

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