Circulation on the Run

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Circulation January 22, 2019 Issue Jan 21, 2019

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and it's editors. We're your co-hosts of Circulation on the Run and if you don't know what this show is about, well, you have to listen to the previous episodes in January please. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Greg Hundley: I'm Greg Hundley from the Pauley Heart Center at VCU Health in Richmond, Virginia. Dr Carolyn Lam: So Greg, before we pick up our coffees and begin discussing a couple of the paper, let's just tell everyone that this feature paper, they have to listen to because it is the results of the cardiac amyloidosis section, or sub-set of the APOLLO study. Have to listen to this one. But how about the other papers in today's issue Greg? Greg Hundley: Right Carolyn, the first one I'm going to start with is from Alexander Fanaroff at Duke University and the DCRI. And basically, this particular paper was looking at the procedural volume and how that might affect outcomes with those that are performing PCI. So they divided the cohort into those individuals that had less than 50 PCIs per year, 50 to 100 and then greater than 100 PCIs per year. So, this is looking at our national cardiovascular data registry within the United States, and of course, as you know, that's linked to Medicare claims data for those that are over 65 years in age. So they had 723,644 PCIs performed by 8,936 operators. And the surprise in this study was that those low volume operators, less than 50 PCIs per year had a one year rate of 15.9% of MACE as opposed to those that were high volume operators that had 16.9% MACE rates. That was significant at a P value of .004. Dr Carolyn Lam: Wait a minute, this seems different from prior reports. Are you saying that those with low volume operators actually had lower mortality? Greg Hundley: Yeah, exactly. And you've pointed out something, cause previously what's been shown is that high volume operators have lower 30 day and in-hospital mortality rates. And that was actually confirmed in this study. But out of a year it was really the low volume operators in unadjusted results had lower rates of all MACE. A very nice editorial by Dharam Kumbhani from UT Southwestern points out that high volume operators do tend to take on more serious cases, those with higher numbers of cardiovascular risk factors. And so, when they did adjustments and accounted for all those risk factors, actually the event rates were the same. Still though, they're the same. And so what could be going on? And the editorialist and also the authors of the paper point out, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't just be focusing on PCI volume per operator, but other quality metrics to look at outcomes. And so this really builds in to the whole quality discussion. Adherence to therapy with the patients in your health care system. What about operator longevity? An operator that may have been doing this for 10 years but has a lower volume, maybe that could come into play. So future studies I think, certainly all over the world in this field, this paper's going to direct us to focus more on other quality issues and not just procedural volume. Dr Carolyn Lam: So, quality versus quantity. Interesting. Well switching gears to a paper that I thought was nice, it is from Dr Lubitz from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues, and they sought to answer the question of whether refining a phenotypic classification of heart failure would facilitate genetic discovery. So, to do that, they defined all cause heart failure among almost 500,000 participants in the UK bio-bank and performed a GWAS study and then later refined the heart failure phenotype by classifying individuals with left ventricular dysfunction but without coronary artery disease as having nonischemic cardiomyopathy and then repeated the GWAS. And basically they found that the GWAS in the all cause heart failure yielded multiple genetic signals for known heart failure risk factors, such as coronary artery disease and atrial fibrillation. However, after refining the heart failure phenotype to a nonischemic cardiomyopathy sub-set, this enhanced the detection of genetic loci associated with dilated cardiomyopathy, which appeared to operate independent of the traditional heart failure risk factors. So that was pretty interesting. Greg Hundley: So where do we go from here with that Carolyn? I mean, what is this telling us and how are we going to move forward with this information? Dr Carolyn Lam: I think the clinical implications are first that common genetic variants associated with both clinical and sub-clinical heart failure, because they looked at left ventricular dysfunction, these genetic variants may be leveraged to improve heart failure risk prediction and prevention. But obviously future studies are warranted to investigate the prognostic and therapeutic implications of these findings. Greg Hundley: Very good. Well I'm going to take us back into the cath lab again and we're going to address fractional flow reserve. And remember, typically, we get fractional flow reserve measures using guide wires, and that's kind of a tough thing to do sometimes in terms of adding links to the procedure, etc. So what these investigators did, they had 10 centers in the United States, Europe and Israel. And this was William Fearon from Stanford University who did this study. And they looked at 301 subjects and they had 319 evaluable vessels. Now what did they compare? They looked at guide wire derived fractional flow reserve versus angiographic derived. Simply, just when you're doing the injections, looking at how quickly that contrast flows down the coronary arteries. And so, in this study the mean fractional flow reserve value was 0.81 and 43% of the vessels they studied had an FFR less than or equal to that magic number of 0.8. Interestingly, the angiographic obtained FFR measures were 94% sensitive and 91% specific for identifying the guide wire derived FFR. That's really incredible. And importantly, the accuracy of this contrast measure was 87% for FFR values between 0.75 and 0.85, that magical threshold. Dr Carolyn Lam: Well that is impressive, suggesting that we don't need guide wires. I mean, is that true for all patients? All vessels? Greg Hundley: Right, so that's sort of the kick here, this is really interesting new data but let's look at the patients that they studied. First of all, they were relatively stable I would say. They had either angina or maybe even unstable angina and non-ST elevation MIs. But no ST elevation MIs. The average stenosis by angiography that they looked at was about 63% and then, very importantly, you have to look at the exclusion criteria. So things that, other conditions within the heart that are going to impact FFR were excluded. So, all their patients had an EF greater than 45%. Nobody had a CABG. Nobody had a chronic total occlusion. Nobody had a heart transplant, aortic stenosis, no heart valve surgery, no left main. It couldn't have had a recent stent within 12 months. It couldn't have had severe diffused disease, no collaterals, no in-stent thrombosis or stenosis. So this technique I think could be useful when you've got that patient perhaps with stable angina, single vessel disease, stenosis severity of 50 to 60% and none of these other conditions, preserved EF etc. But for many of the patients that we send to the cath lab, this technique, we still need a little bit more development. We don't know its utility. You've got another paper? Dr Carolyn Lam: I've got another few papers because I'm going to drag you out of the cath lab right now and into the ICU. And we're talking about cardiogenic shock and it's really nice that we have these three papers in today's issue. One's an original paper and two are On my Mind articles. Now the original paper talks about the randomized shock cool trial. This is from Dr Thiele from the heart center Leipzig in University Hospital in Germany. And it is an un-blinded, randomized trial of 40 patients with cardiogenic shock undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention. And without a classical indication from mild therapeutic hypothermia, but randomized one-to-one to mild therapeutic hypothermia for 24 hours versus control. And basically the mild therapeutic hypothermia did not show a substantial beneficial effect on the primary outcome of cardiac power index at 24 hours or on any other of the hemodynamic parameters. And there was also no difference in the short and long term outcomes. So a neutral trial. But taking a step back and just talking about these patients with cardiogenic shock and all the different ways that we have now to keep them alive, I really want to highlight these two On My Mind papers. One is by Drs Gill, Grunau and MacRedmond from University of British Columbia. And they really talk about the need to define limits for extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In a very similar vein, Drs Mulaikal, Nakagawa and Prager from Columbia University also wrote a beautiful piece on ECMO, ECMO as a bridge to no recovery. And when is enough enough? So really, really interesting conversations and discussions regarding what is death, when do we have to put a time limit perhaps to these therapies? And yet not limit the potential life-saving effects of these. I really strongly encourage our listeners to read these papers and also to stay tuned because coming right up, a very important paper on the APOLLO study in our feature discussion. For today's feature paper we're discussing the results of a sub-study of the APOLLO study. Now this deals with cardiac amyloidosis, a super, super hot subject. And we have super, super hot guests today on the show. The first our corresponding author, doctor Scott Solomon from Brigham and Women's Hospital as well as our associate editor doctor Justin Ezekowitz. Welcome both, and let's just plunge straight into it. So Scott, tell us, tell us about this APOLLO sub-study. Scott Solomon: APOLLO is a study of patients with hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis and, as you know, that hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis is an inherited disease caused by mutations of the transthyretin gene and these mutations cause the transthyretin protein to misfold and then accumulate as amyloid fibrils which go to the nerves and go to the heart. And we know that this can cause severe polyneuropathy and cardiomyopathy, partly depending on which mutation the patients have. And we, as cardiologists, are aware that when amyloid infiltrates the heart it can increase cardiac wall thickness, it can cause increase in chamber stiffness, it can result in severe diastolic dysfunction and these patients, often with cardiac involvement of amyloid, have a really markedly reduced life-span and really poor quality of life. The APOLLO study was a study of a new agent that is designed to reduce transthyretin, it's a transthyretin knock-down agent. It's basically an RNAi therapeutic, it basically is a small, interfering RNA that basically blocks the production of transthyretin and this is one of several approaches that are currently being considered for amyloid disease. And APOLLO is primarily designed as a study to look at neuropathy. The primary end-point was a neurologic scale to look at neuropathy, but it was also designed to secondarily look at some cardiac end-points, especially in the patients who were felt to have cardiac involvement. Dr Carolyn Lam: Cool. And so your current paper deals with that cardiac amyloidosis sub-set, but it was pre-specified, it was planned, right? Scott Solomon: Yeah, it was a pre-specified sub-group. In fact, what we did is we actually did echocardiograms on everybody in the study and then defined a pre-specified cardiac sub-population that was comprised of patients who had a very high likelihood of having cardiac amyloid involvement, and so this was patients who had a baseline left ventricular wall thickness of 13mm or greater and no history of either aortic valve disease or hypertension. And so this was a group that we thought most likely had evidence of cardiac involvement. And just so it's clear, we did echocardiography on everybody in the study and in this paper we reported in both everybody and in the pre-specified cardiac sub-population. So we looked a number of things in these patients including various measures of cardiac structure function including wall thickness, left ventricular mass, ejection fraction, cardiac output, atrial size, volumes and myocardial strain which, as you know, has been particularly useful in assessment of patients with amyloidosis. And we also looked at reduction or improvement in Anti-proBNP which, as you know, is a very good measure of the severity of heart failure in patients. And so, of the 225 patients who enrolled overall in the APOLLO study, 126 were part of this pre-specified cardiac sub-population. And in this group of patients, we've observed a reduction in left ventricular wall thickness of about a millimeter. And this was statistically significant in the patients who were treated with patisiran compared with placebo. We also saw an improvement in global longitudinal strain and improvement of cardiac output and an increase of left ventricular end-diastolic volume. In this case an increase in end-diastolic volume is actually a good thing because these patients often start out with smaller end-diastolic volumes because of the increased wall thickness. Those improvements in echocardiography were really paralleled by dramatic improvements in Anti-proBNP and we started out with patients with abnormal Anti-proBNPs in the range of about 800. These were significantly reduced, highly significantly reduced with a P value of about seven times 10 to minus eighth at both nine and 18 months, so pretty dramatic relative reduction in Anti-proBNP in the patisiran group compared to placebo. Dr Carolyn Lam: Super exciting, and it really adds to mounting evidence isn't it? That we're sort of reaching a really effective treatment for these patients and who knows how common they are. But Justin, you've been thinking a lot about this, what are your thoughts? Justin Ezekowitz: This is a terrific paper, and this is a groundbreaking therapy. Scott, this really has something for everybody, for example functional Anti-proBNP and echocardiographic measures of improvement and also less deterioration which I think is also holding it in its tracks. The question is, if you have 126 patients in the cardiac sub-group, whether or not this is really prime for clinical integration, as to start using this therapy broadly or do we need to really broaden the scope and do larger outcome studies with this therapy for these patients, recognizing some of the gaps in any clinical trial design and implementation. So what are your thoughts on that? Scott Solomon: First of all, it's important to remember that the APOLLO study was designed primarily to look at the neurologic outcomes, not the cardiac outcomes. The cardiac outcomes were technically considered exploratory and, in fact, although really pretty impressive in this group, this wasn't really how the study was designed. And so the current indication for this particular therapy. Patisiran is for the improvement in the neurologic outcomes, not for the cardiac. So I think that there will need to be additional studies that will look more specifically at the cardiac effects, although I think these are among the most impressive findings we've seen with any agent that is interfering with transthyretin. And just to put this in context, there are a variety of ways in which amyloid ca…

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Circulation January 15, 2018 Issue Jan 14, 2019

Show notes

Dr Carolyn Lam: Hello. We're here at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago where circulation has 19 simultaneous publications this year. And that is a huge increase from six in the past to 19, all thanks to the man next to me. But first, let me introduce myself. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam. I'm associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. I'm the voice you hear on 'Circulation On the Run'. I'm so pleased to be here in person today with Dr Dharam Kumbhani. He's associate editor from UT Southwestern and he also leads the simultaneous publications for this journal. So big applause for this amazing bonanza this year. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: Thank you. Dr Carolyn Lam: Next to him, we have Dr Sana Al-Khatib and she's from the Duke University. And finally, Dr Gabriel Steg from University of Paris. Wow! Okay, we've got 19 papers to chat about. No, I'm just kidding. We're going to talk and focus on the seven simultaneous publications that were late-breaking science. Why don't you start us off, Dharam. We will first start with the interventional trials, and there were three of them. I'd love you to chat about the first of them, but even before that, maybe, tell us what it's like to get a simultaneous publication. Because I think people underestimate the amount of work it takes to do that. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: Thanks a lot, Carolyn. I think under Joe's leadership the whole space of simultaneous publications in late paying clinical science has really been a big endeavor for him and for the journal. We just have an amazing team that's able to work on this in very quick order. So, for the viewers, I think it's a very involved process, but it's a very gratifying process. We work very closely among the associate editors, the senior editors, and then the circ staff, and we have very rapid turnaround time. So we owe a lot of gratitude to our reviewers who frequently will turn these reviews in within 48 hours. Our goal has been that we respond back with a decision usually within five to seven days. So it's been very gratifying. Then it moves onto the next set of revisions, et cetera. But even among the papers that we are unable to accept for circulation, it's just a quick turnaround time for the authors so they haven't lost as much time and can potentially look elsewhere. It's been a really gratifying process. It's been a great, great team effort. I appreciate everything you said, but really I don't deserve all that credit. It's been a great team effort. Dr Carolyn Lam: No, it's been rumored there's a lot of lost sleep on your end, so thank you, thank you Dharam for this. And maybe you could open with the ISAR-TEST 4, that's been [crosstalk 00:02:47]. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: Yeah, well thank you. I think we had some really interesting interventional trials and Dr Steg will discuss a couple of them as well. ISAR-TEST 4 was a very interesting trial. It is one of the first 10 trials that gets to the 10-year mark, so this is just the 10-year follow-up results of that. It was about a 2500 patient trial. It was done in Germany, multiple centers. Really they were trying to assess the space that they were trying to ... Or the knowledge gap that they were trying to fill was the durability of the bioabsorbable polymer stents. Specifically, they were looking at a bioabsorbable polymer sirolimus-eluting stent, the Yukon stent, and then they compared that with durable polymer stents including Xience or the everolimus-eluting stent and then Cypher, which is no longer available in the U.S., but that's a permanent polymer sirolimus-eluting stent. The primary results were published and presented a long time ago. There was really MACE events at one year and it showed non-inferiority for this bioabsorbable polymer stent back then. So, then they had, incredibly, 83% of the cohort that they were able to follow-up out of 10 years. And what they showed is that ... I don't want to necessarily get into the numbers and the details as much, but what they showed is that this bioabsorbable polymer sirolimus-eluting stent tended to have similar outcomes to Xience, which we accept as state of the art current generation stent, permanent polymer. And it did better than the Cypher stent, both in terms of MACE events and stent thrombosis. So suggesting that, the big advance in the field for this is ... This is a long-term follow-up of the stent. It suggests that outcomes may be similar in this patient population. Although only 12% were really enrolled with an MI in this patient population. Most of them were stable or less sick ACS patients. And they show fairly good outcomes out of 10 years, comparable to Xience and better than Cypher. I think it was interesting. Gabriel, what is your take [crosstalk 00:04:57]. Dr Gabriel Steg: I think it's important. There's been a tremendous interest in international community on trying to tease out which are the best types of stents and beyond brands, try to understand the type of stent, the coating, the drug that you put on it, whether the polymer is durable or not durable. I think these types of fairly well done, large randomized trials with long term flow are critical. A lot of the focus in the interventional community originally was on lumen size, late loss, angiographic parameters short term. And now the field has matured, and we've moved to clinical outcomes, patient-oriented outcomes, long term follow-up. And it's important because we've learned from long term trials such as PROTECT that the result at one year may not predict what happens at five years, and sometimes you have surprises. So, it's really important. We owe it to our patients because these are irretrievable devices. Once you've implanted them, they are there. We talked about Cypher being out of the market, but there are more than a million patients who walk every day on this plant with a Cypher in their coronary artery, so we better know what the long-term follow-up is. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: Yeah, that's a great point. Dr Carolyn Lam: Wow. And then thanks also for the discussion that allows me, as a noninterventionist, to realize ... It's hard to keep track of what's happening with all the different types of stents and polymers and so on. But could you then summarize for the field, does that mean that these biodegradable ones are now ... Do I sound ignorant when I say that? That they are now really in the game. Is that what it does? Dr Dharam Kumbhani: This whole bioabsorbable field, there are nuances. So this really is testing a bioabsorbable polymer where - Dr Carolyn Lam: Oh! Dr Dharam Kumbhani: So, with every stent you have a stent, you have the polymer, and then you have the drug. Dr Carolyn Lam: Thank you. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: And so, the polymer and the drug go away, and then you're left behind with a bare metal stent. And that's this Yukon stent. Dr Carolyn Lam: Got it. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: The one that has been in the press a lot more is the bioabsorbable scaffold where the stent and the polymer and the drug, everything in theory should be gone at a certain period of time. So this is ... It's an important distinction though. Because I know that it's very confusion when you just say bioabsorbable and it's unclear if you're talking about the polymer or you're talking about the stent, itself. But this really was a bioabsorbable polymer issue, so you're left behind with a bare metal stent at the end of it. Dr Carolyn Lam: Got it, crystal clear, and thank you. That's cool. That's super. Dr Sana Al-Khatib: I agree, for an electrophysiologist too. Dr Carolyn Lam: But now, let's go into the AMI field. There were two trials that really spoke to acute management patients coming in with an AMI and with cardiogenic shock, for example. Gabriel, could you tell us a little bit about the IABP-SHOCK II trial, as well as the really talked about a door-to-unload IMPELLA Trial. Dr Gabriel Steg: The IABP II trial is a randomized trial looking at the benefit, or lack thereof, of intraaortic balloon pump in patients with cardiogenic shock and acute MI. It's been standard practice since the '60s to offer IABP pumping to patients with cardiogenic shocks and AMI. So, literally more than a million patients have been implanted with IABP, but the reality is when we look at the randomized trial evidence of benefit there was none. They were very small trials, inconclusive, underpowered. Professor Thiele from Germany and his colleagues deserve enormous credit for having had the courage to really do what needed to be done. A proper randomized controlled trial, of course open label. And what they found in IABP II, which they already reported a few years ago, was that there was no acute benefit of IABP on survival short term, or for that matter on many of the secondary clinical outcomes looked at in this trial. They subsequently reported one year mortality. What they did here is they gathered follow-up on almost all of the cohort at more than six years. And they found that the long term survival is identical for patients who received an IABP and those who did not. So I think this nails the issue. But there's another thing we learn. The mortality at six years is staggering, it's close to 60%. And although a large fraction of the patients die in the first 30 days, you still have an additional 10% of patients who die between the first year and six years. So there still remains a very sick patient population for whom we need to investigate new strategies. I don't think it's going to be necessarily mechanical. We have to think of all of the strategies we do to prevent and mitigate cardiogenic shock to build up. And that's gets us to the second trial that I'll talk to you about in a minute. Dr Sana Al-Khatib: I have a quick question about this. Did they provide any information about modes of death in these patients? Dr Gabriel Steg: Yes. They did capture information about that. Off the top of my head, I'm unable to provide information, but yes they did capture that. The German system allowed them to retrieve information about causes of death and it's a closed system. It's a national trial, so they were able to get enormous follow-up. Dr Sana Al-Khatib: Because this information can help us inform what interventions are needed next. Dr Gabriel Steg: Yes. That's really important. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: To your point about ... You use a very interesting word, the last nail. That's actually how Dr Hochman addressed her editorial. She wrote a really nice editorial- Dr Gabriel Steg: The leading expert in the field. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: And so, I'm interested in your thoughts. The use of balloon pumps for shock, there's a discrepancy between the American guidelines and the European guidelines. Last year the European guidelines were updated. It is really such a practice changing guideline in that it now lists routine use of balloon pumps in cardiogenic shock- Dr Gabriel Steg: Class III. Dr Dharam Kumbhani: -as a class III indication. Going through training, that was all you had when someone came in with shock, you would throw in a balloon pump. So that's really quite a practice changing event. Dr Gabriel Steg: Yeah. These investigators are embarking on new studies with ECMO and I think it's going to be fascinating to see whether ECMO, which also gets increasingly used worldwide, whether there is evidence to acutely support or not whether this is useful. I think they are doing the proper thing. They are doing the right thing, randomized trials. And we could commend them because these are really difficult trials. Dr Carolyn Lam: Absolutely. Dr Gabriel Steg: In the acute MI setting, shock patients, ECMO, IABP, that's really difficult. They are brave investigators, they are good investigators, and I think they provided the community with a clear answer. Dr Carolyn Lam: And exactly the kind of papers that we like publishing at circulation, isn't it? Now what about the door-to-unload? Dr Gabriel Steg: That is actually a good segue with door-to-unload because if we can't properly treat shock once it's there, can we do something to prevent shock? Can we do something to preserve myocardium? One of the experimental findings that is very clear is that if you unload experimental myocardial infarction, if you unload the left ventricle you reduce infarct size. Dr Gabriel Steg: So, investigators have been trying to translate this experimental finding into the clinical arena using the Impella device. There's enormous interest, particularly in North America for Impella use in acute MI patients with larger infarcts with the idea that if you can unload the left ventricle, you might be able to mitigate the extent of the myocardial infarction, and therefore avoid cardiogenic shock and probably improve prognosis. Although this is a very attractive theoretical concept, it still deserves to be tested. And so, if you want to test it you have to unload the ventricle as soon as possible, ideally before reperfusion, which means that you're going to have to delay reperfusion for the time of implanting the device and unloading the ventricle. And so what the investigators did in this trial is to study whether delaying proposedly by 30 minutes reperfusion, to unload the ventricle for 30 minutes prior to reperfusion, was feasible and reasonably safe. It's a small trial. It's really a pilot trial. By no means does it test the proof of concept of the device or the theoretical issue, but it shows that it's feasible. There doesn't seem to be a massive increase in total time to reperfusion because just by change the group that was not delayed had a longer time to PCI, so eventually things are sort of evening out. They looked at MRI size of infarcts at follow-up. There was no obvious difference, but of course it could still be tied to errors. We're not totally sure about this, but it certainly paves the way for doing a proper proof of concept randomized trial, testing unloading versus no unloading with a true control group. And I think that's what investigators are looking forward, but I understand there's immense interest for this concept in international community, particularly in the United States and I'm quite curious to see what this future trial will look like and what the results will be. Dr Carolyn Lam: Yeah, indeed. Gabriel, I noticed you were very careful to frame it, to say what the trial was trying to address and what it wasn't. And there's been quite a bit of buzz after that. Do you agree with everything Gabriel has said and what have you heard? Dr Dharam Kumbhani: I think he was incredibly eloquent in outlining the premise of the trial and what it really showed. I think the one thing that ... And this was brought up in the very nice editorial by Dr Patel from Duke as well, is it would've been really nice to have a control arm which didn't have any unloading. Because these are not patients with shock, that just directly had primary PCI. And then comparing infarct size. So, I think that was one of the pieces of information that would've been helpful to then put this in perspective. When you have an infarct size of 8% or 10%, how does that compare in the same patient population in their testing? You're absolutely right about the need to do difficult trials like this, where a lot of times it's just assumed to be true and is embraced in clinical practice. As I gave the example about the balloon pump earlier, where as a Fellow you saw someone in shock and your reflex was to put in a balloon pump. And so, I think testing these very diffi…

Full show notes at the publisher

Circulation January 8, 2019 Issue Jan 07, 2019

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation On The Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and it's editors. I'm Dr Caroline Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Greg Hundley: And I'm Greg Hundley, Professor at the Pauley Heart Center of Virginia Commonwealth University Health Sciences in Richmond, Virginia. Dr Carolyn Lam: In case you guys missed us last week, this is how our new podcast is gonna work. Greg and I are going to invite you for coffee with us, almost with a journal in hand, and we're gonna chat about the week's issue, highlighting two original papers each, that we thought were awesome. And don't you worry, the feature discussion is still there, authors will join us for a feature discussion right after our coffee. And for this week, the feature paper speaks about the MOMENTUM 3 trial, and talks about the important analysis of stroke outcomes in this trial. But before that, I think Greg, you've got a couple of papers don't you? Greg Hundley: Absolutely Carolyn. So the whole issue, I think we're gonna pick out several stroke papers, really a stroke theme. The first paper is Ankit Maheshwari. He looked at the utility of P-wave morphology on the 12-lead electrocardiogram, to help predict ischemic stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. Now, how did he do this? Basically, they looked at a large cohort of individuals from the ARIC study, and these were patients that developed atrial fibrillation. And electrocardiograms had been recorded prior to their Afib episode. So, what were they looking for in P-wave morphology? Well, they were looking for changes in Lead three. They were looking for changes in V1. They were also looking for extension of that P-wave. So a prolonged duration. And what they observed, is that that abnormal P-wave, could forecast abnormal atrial remodeling, that might be an indicator of future stroke. Dr Carolyn Lam: Huh, interesting. But is it really reproducible? Did they validate it somehow? Greg Hundley: Yeah, so that's great Carolyn. You know, in papers like this, you like to take a finding in one large cohort, but then you've got to reproduce it. So they went to the MESA Study. Remember now, Mesa are individuals without cardiovascular disease. ARIC are patients with cardiovascular disease. And the finding was reproducible in MESA. Also, what the authors did, is they looked at the relevance of this EKG finding to our existing CHADS-VASc2 scoring system. And what was really smart by these investigators, is that if you added the information from the abnormal P-wave morphology to the CHADS-VASc2 score, you could forecast stroke. Now you say, well CHADS-VASc2 is already pretty reliable, but what about those patients that have a CHADS-VASc score of one right? We're always kind of wondering, do we anticoagulate them? Do we give them aspirin, et cetera. Well if the P-wave morphology was abnormal and they were at higher risk for stroke, that could sway you as a clinician, to go ahead and prescribe anticoagulation for that group of patients. And something very simple, just from the 12-lead EKG before the patients went into atrial fibrillation. You've got a paper that also is sort of focusing on stroke. You want to tell us about that? Dr Carolyn Lam: Yeah, one big data to another big data series. This time, it's Get With The Guidelines Stroke series, and this paper is from Dr Menon from University of Calgary in Canada. Where they described the door to treatment times for endovascular therapy in acute stroke. What is that? Well that's a time interval from when the patient arrives in the emergency department or the door, to the first pass of the treatment initiation and endovascular therapy. And basically they found that the median door to first pass time was 130 minutes. Only 3% of patients achieved a door to first pass time of less than 60 minutes. In multivariable analyses, older age arrival during nonregular hours and a history of diabetes, were all associated with the longer door to first pass time. And finally, among hospitals with an annual endovascular therapy case volume of 40 or less, every five unit increase in that volume was associated with a 3% reduction in this door to first pass time. Greg Hundley: It sounds like that could be really useful information for stroke centers, you know, that are managing these patients acutely. How do you think these results are going to impact that Carolyn? Dr Carolyn Lam: Great question. So first thing is, I think it provides some benchmark times for this in hospital workflow, and it obviously shows areas of improvement. For example, improving workflow during nonregular hours, or increasing the experience of a center, and basically emphasizes the point that efforts on streamlining workflow and saving time, need to continue so that the full potential of endovascular therapy is realized. Greg Hundley: Oh wow, that's outstanding. I'm gonna transition sort of to a basic science paper, also trying to help manage patients with stroke. This one is looking at the safety of all of the dehydrogenased right stem cells. Well, what the world is that. In animals, what has been shown previously, is this particular cells type, that's harvested from your bone marrow, can be infused into the carotid artery, and those animals experience smaller neurologic deficits after stroke. And so with that encouraging result in animals, these investigators sought to test the efficacy of this type of therapy, well not really the efficacy, but the safety of this type of approach in those patients that have sustained actually quite a large stroke. You had to have a relatively large neurologic deficit to qualify for this study. And just quickly, the way this works is these cells enter up through the bloodstream and they modulate inflammation. By modulating inflammation, that facilitates healing in the stroke patient. Dr Carolyn Lam: Yeah, but wow. I mean bone marrow, biopsy and isolating the cells and so on. How is the study done? Greg Hundley: So, the key here is you've had your stroke, you're still in the hospital with a large neurologic deficit. And so day 11 to 17, you undergo a bone marrow biopsy. Then the cells are purified, and they're reinfused into your carotid artery by the way. And so, what was the study trying to do? Well, it was actually looking at the safety off all this. And what would the concern be? You're infusing these cells into the carotid artery. They go into the cerebral microcirculation, and those that are working in this field, are concerned is that going to promote more emboli? Is that going to promote thrombus? Extend the size of the infarct in the brain, et cetera? So, the investigators performed MRI's and neurologic exams. And what they found is the neurologic findings in the patients really didn't change, so there was no benefit. But the study wasn't set up to look for a benefit. And there were four patients that had a little bit of an enlargement of the stroke observed on MRI. So, a lot more to come in this basic science realm, but it's interesting to see investigators thinking about this in a whole different way, where we're harvesting one cell type from your body, and then infusing it up into the brain to sort of help rescue the situation. Dr Carolyn Lam: Well, another paper dealing with stroke. This time, a Mendelian randomization study to explore whether genetically determined circulating levels of cytokines and growth factors, may be associated with stroke. And this was done in the mega stroke GWA data set and validated in the UK biobank, and it's by Dr Dichgans and colleagues from the university hospital, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. They basically found, that a genetic predisposition to higher circulating levels of monocyte chemoattractant protein one, was associated with a higher risk of stroke. The associations also found for the etiology of the stroke subtypes, and especially for large artery stroke and cardioembolic stroke. In fact the genetically determined levels of this monocyte chemoattractant protein one, was also associated with higher risk of the related phenotypes of coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction. Greg Hundley: So, how do you bring this to practice in the clinic Carolyn? Dr Carolyn Lam: So, this is still some steps away, but I do think that it very nicely supports the idea that inflammation as part of the pathogenesis of stroke, and of course additional work is needed to determine whether targeting the specific monocyte chemoattractant protein one, or it's downstream effectors, may be a meaningful strategy to lower stroke risk. So, terribly interesting. Greg Hundley: Yeah, you know it sounds like hitting inflammation or targeting that, is a real theme here from the basic science group. Well this is great Carolyn. And now, I guess we'll transition over to our feature article. Dr Carolyn Lam: Absolutely. So, we're here to discuss the long-term results of the MOMENTUM 3 Trial, and that was a randomized controlled trial of the HeartMate 3 versus the Heartmate II left ventricular assist device. And this time, with a focus on stroke. The outcomes that's just so important to our patients. Greg and I are incredibly pleased to have with us, the authors, Dr Mandeep Mehra from Brigham and Women's Hospital, as well as our senior associate editor, Dr Biykem Bozkurt, to discuss this paper. Mandeep, perhaps just set the scene by telling us what this secondary analysis found? Dr Mandeep Mehra: This analysis is really focused on the issue of stroke, as you pointed out. I'd like to just lace into context what this is important. Ever since the advent of left ventricular assist device therapy from the 80s and early 90s, to now, one of the major Achilles' heels, whether we have used pulsatile flow devices or non-pulsatile flow devices, has been the very constant occurrence of a high incidence of stroke, beyond the stroke rates were predominantly as compared to ischemic strokes. Then with the newer devices, we actually saw a reversal, where we began to see more ischemic strokes as opposed to hemorrhagic strokes, almost an equal parts at this time point. And this has been one of the critical reasons why we have not been able to expand the therapy beyond the very, very sick patient. Greg Hundley: Very nice. And another particular in the results here is, you didn't really see a difference in stroke rates, either hemorrhagic or ischemic strokes early, but you did start to see a difference after 180 days. Why do you think that's the case? Dr Mandeep Mehra: That's a great point Greg. We really saw no difference in the first 30 days. When we analyzed this data, we divided it into a perioperative, a first 30-day time point. Then, we looked at the short-term time point up to 180 days or six months, and then beyond that to the two year end point. What became very clear is that most of the gains that we saw in the stroke rate, began to appear after the first 30 days, did not quite reach statistical significance at six months, but really the differences became heavily pronounced after six months, all the way out to two years. So, first point that I would make Greg, is that we did see differences beyond 30 days, it's just that they didn't reach conventional statistical significance. The second thing is, the more important point that you make, asking why that was the case. We actually think that the reason behind that, is that the first three months or so after that implant, really is a period of chaos in these patients, where the hemocompatibility, which is essentially the interface between the device as well as the patient, is attempting to be established. And it's very similar in a way as we see in heart transplantation Greg, where the real challenge in heart transplantation is between rejection and infection. And in the case of left ventricular assist device is the challenges between bleeding and thrombosis. It turns out that three months, whether it be transplantation or whether it be left ventricular assist devices, seems to be this period of chaos and adjustment, during which the patient and the device are starting to get to know each other. And this is why we think that most of the gains occurred after this period of chaos was overcome. Greg Hundley: No, it's really interesting that after accounting or adjusting for all the anticoagulant drugs, antiplatelet drugs, even the other medical therapies that were applied, you found these results. I mean, maybe also bring in Biykem here to answer the question, what is this machine doing that's providing such a benefit? Dr Biykem Bozkurt: The two-year results being quite impressive for the HeartMate 3 are truly encouraging. Because I think we truly see a concordance benefit beyond 180 days, especially the nondisabling strokes, giving the hope to the providers that we can further perhaps enhance the field by focusing on optimization of anticoagulation strategies, prevention of atrial fibrillation, and maybe even consider our algorithms or pathways for stroke. Because, in this protocol, even though the stroke management was not standardized, and I'm sure that the data will not yield that information as to which centers were able to approach the stroke management in a perhaps evidence based approach, the sobering facts are regardless of the device, at two years, approximately half of the patients died. Even the non-disabling stroke patients had increased mortality compared to no-stroke patients. And if you examine evidence-based approaches, only one-third of the hemorrhagic stroke patients had reversal of anticoagulation, and a very small percentage ... actually, none of the patients had device intervention for the ischemic stroke. That raises the question of yes at two years the HeartMate 3 results are very promising. But, can we further even advance the field by doing evidence based standardized pathway driven stroke treatment approaches. The other very interesting finding from this trial is, in ENDURANCE trial, which was another trial with centrifugal device, HVAD device, there was an association of the stroke rates with inadequate control of blood pressure and anticoagulation, which was not noted in this trial. Maybe Mandeep can comment on do we truly have the adequate power to be able to infer whether blood pressure control and/or appropriate anticoagulation management strategies will matter? Dr Mandeep Mehra: Biykem you've said it really well, and I'd like to just make some additional points with respect to the question. So, first of all Greg you're absolutely correct, that we tried to search for anything that would predict this reduction in stroke with the HeartMate 3, and it turned out that all we were left with is the device itself. So, it really begs the question, what is it about the device or it's interface that may have resulted in this. And of course, some of what I'm about to tell you will be speculation, but it may actually carry some water. So, for example, the HeartMate 3 is very unique in one other aspect, and that is that, even though it's a small profile device, it's engineering principles are such that it allows for very wide blood flow pathways. And in fact, despite its small profile, the blood flow pathways allow for 20 times more red blood cells to travel through the primary and secondary pathway, than other devices. What it means is that as blood is going through this device, it is exposed to very low sheer stress. And in return, the benefit that we see very clearly with this device in a very, very important way, is the fact that we see almost no denovo pump thrombosis developing with this device. Certainly, if…

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Circulation January 2, 2019 Issue Dec 31, 2018

Show notes

Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the run, your weekly podcast summary and back stage pass to the journal and its editors, and welcome to a whole new podcast format in 2019. Ha-ha, I bet that surprised you. Well guess what? This new format promises more interaction, more discussion and a whole lot more fun, and that's because to begin with, you don't have to listen to me talk to myself half the time anymore. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore, and I am simply delighted that Santa gave me a partner on this podcast, and co-hosted with me, and my gift is none other than Dr Greg Hundley, associate editor from the Pauley Heart Center, at Virginia Commonwealth University Health Sciences. Welcome Greg. Dr Gregory Hundley: Thank you so much Carolyn. How exciting is it to start this new year with this exciting format, where we'll take several of the key manuscripts from Circulation and discuss them? Picking five each time, and as you've alluded to, we're not going to get rid of that favorite format, where we take a select paper and interview and work with the authors. Dr Carolyn Lam: Exactly. In fact, maybe I could liken it to welcoming everyone to join us over a cup of coffee, each week, with the journal in the hand and we're just going to discuss it, and never forgetting that feature paper with the authors, and this week's paper is huge. I love it. We're actually going to be talking about blood pressure control in the barber shop. But before then, here's the articles that we've chosen to discuss. So Greg, you got your coffee ready? Shall we start? Dr Gregory Hundley: Absolutely Carolyn, and let's get going first with Gorav Ailwadi, from University of Virginia, his paper evaluating the utility of MitraClips in those with secondary mitral regurgitation. This is really a follow-up from the EVEREST study. It's not a randomized trial, but it's a longitudinal look over time, at 616 patients. Interestingly, those individuals that had class three or four heart failure, that had the MitraClip, the left ventricular volumes got smaller in a year, the hazard ratio for events became less. The magnitude of mitral regurgitation went from 4+ down to 2+. Exciting findings. Dr Carolyn Lam: Interesting, but you know Greg, these all sound so positive. Why is it so different in the Mitra FR study? Dr Gregory Hundley: Absolutely Carolyn. So, as you know, Mitra FR, that was a randomized trial. So, this study doesn't compare, the EVEREST study in this issue, doesn't compare with conventional medical therapy, that's number one, and Mitra FR did. Also, the Mitra FR patients were a little bit sicker. The ejection fraction really was 15 to 40 percent, and in the EVEREST study, much higher, average 45 percent. In fact, many had a normal EF. So it really raises a lot of questions as to whether or not this finding will hold up in future randomized trials, which we'll be looking to see the results. Dr Carolyn Lam: Indeed, and it was really nicely discussing the accompanying editorial wasn't it, which I really enjoyed. Well, the paper I picked out Greg is from Dr Gatzoulis from The Royal Brompton Hospital, and it's actually the MAESTRO trial. Now, MAESTRO is a randomized control trial of the endothelin receptor antagonist macitentan in patients with Eisenmenger syndrome. Short and long of it, macitentan did not show superiority over placebo on the primary endpoint of change in baseline to week 16 in exercise capacity. And there was also no relevant trends observed for the secondary endpoints. However, among the exploratory endpoints, macitentan did reduce Nt-proBNP in the main cohort, and improved pulmonary vascular resistant index, and exercise capacity, in a hemodynamic sub-study. Importantly also, there were no specific safety concerns with macitentan. Dr Gregory Hundley: Sounds really interesting, Carolyn. But how did this compare with prior studies that have really focused on endothelin? Dr Carolyn Lam: Great question. So, MAESTRO's only the second randomized control trial of an endothelin receptor antagonist in Eisenmenger Syndrome. BREATHE-5 was the first, and this used a different endothelin receptor antagonist that was bosentan, also in Eisenmenger Syndrome, and actually found that bosentan reduced pulmonary vascular resistance as its primary efficacy endpoint, without worsening systemic pulse of symmetry. So, very different trials in terms of endpoints, as you can hear, but also importantly, different populations that were enrolled. MAESTRO enrolled a more heterogeneous population with more complex forms of Eisenmenger, including patients with Down syndrome, had a broader WHO functional class inclusion, and allowed the use of pre-existing therapies such as PDE5 inhibitors. Dr Gregory Hundley: That's really spectacular, Carolyn. Very interesting findings for something that these vasoconstrictors, vasodilators, often very harmful. Switching over, I've got sort of another paper that is also working on vasodilation, but comes really from the world of basic science. And it's from Ingrid Fleming from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, examining how does hydrogen sulfide, a common gas that we have in the environment, it smells terrible, we worry about sulfuric acid and acid rain, but how does this promote vasodilation in the system? And so, in this basic science study, they unlocked sort of a key that this hydrogen sulfide is produced by cystathionine gamma-lyase, CSE. And why is that important, and what does it do? Well, production of H2S by CSE goes and inhibits human antigen R, or HuR, that regulates cellular proliferation and growth. And so, basically these authors have unlocked a mechanism by which hydrogen sulfide can be protective. So, what's interesting Carolyn is that patients can have elevated levels of L-cysteine, increased expression of CSE, so you've got the components and the manufacturer of H2S, but they still have low arterial levels. Dr Carolyn Lam: Hm. So, how can this be addressed then? How can we raise that H2S? Dr Gregory Hundley: That's what's so clever that the investigators found out, Carolyn. They found a slow-release oral active drug, a sulfide donor called sodium polysulthionate, H2R, or sulfhydration, and can inhibit atherosclerosis development or progression when these levels are low. Dr Carolyn Lam: Indeed. sodium polysulthionate. Awesome, Greg! That is so cool. Honestly I just loved your explanation of that. Okay. Well, I've got another paper to share. And this is from Dr Bress and colleagues from University of Utah School of Medicine. And this one is really interesting because these authors estimated the number of cardiovascular disease events that could be prevented, and the treatment-related serious adverse events that could occur over ten years, if U.S. adults with hypertension were achieving the 2017 ACC/AHA guideline recommended BP goals, compared to their current blood pressure levels, as well as compared to achieving the older 2003 JNC7 goals, or the older 2014 JNC8 goals. Now, basically they found that achieving and maintaining the 2017 guideline blood pressure goals over ten years could prevent three million cardiovascular disease events, a greater number of events prevented compared to prior guidelines, but this could also lead to 3.3 million more treatment-related serious adverse events. Dr Gregory Hundley: So, Carolyn, hasn't a main concern of this type of work been that these new guidelines over-extend the reach of our treatment? Dr Carolyn Lam: That's a real concern that I've also heard. The lower blood pressure thresholds used to define hypertension in the 2017 guidelines could indeed lead to more diagnoses. However, this paper helped because remember that the recommendation for anti-hypertensive drug treatment in patients with the pre-treatment blood pressure of 130-139 systolic, or 80-89 diastolic, was limited to those at high cardiovascular disease risk. So not everyone, but only those at high cardiovascular disease risk. And so, treatment under the 2017 guidelines, by these data, would lead to more health gains, while only extending treatment to 5.4% more adults with hypertension compared to JNC7. So, this paper really modeled these things out with important contemporary U.S. adult populations using a national representative, a sample of U.S. adults, and NHANES, as well as REGARDS, and they also used estimates of benefit from the recent large meta-analysis of 42 blood pressure-lowering trials. So, important data that I think are going to be reassuring to a lot of people managing these patients. Well Greg, that really brings us to the end of our little chat. Now, let's move to our future discussion, shall we? Could cutting blood pressure in a barber shop be the long-term solution to hypertension in African-American men? Well, the future paper of this first issue in 2019 really talks about it. Greg and I are so delighted to have with us the authors of the paper, Dr Ciantel Blyler, and Dr Florian Rader from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, as well as our associate editor, Dr Wanpen Vongpatanasin. So, Ciantel, can you just perhaps start by telling us what you found. Dr Ciantel Blyler: So, what we're talking about today are the 12-month results as a follow-up to our 6-month results that we published earlier this year. So, we took 319 African-American men in Los Angeles County, and randomized them to two groups. One group saw a clinical pharmacist who worked with them to reduce their blood pressure, and the other group just worked with their barber to talk about blood pressure, and encourage usual follow-up. And, as we saw at the 6-month mark, blood pressure really improved in the group that was able to work with the clinical pharmacist. So, we saw an almost 29 mm Hg drop in the intervention group, as compared to only 7 mm Hg in the control group. Dr Gregory Hundley: Ciantel, Florian, that is really exciting results. What is a collaborative practice arrangement, and how did you affect that in Los Angeles? Dr Ciantel Blyler: So, collaborative practice is actually widespread in the United States. California is one particular state that is kind of ahead of the curve with respect to collaborative practice between pharmacists and physicians. But what it essentially allows a pharmacist to do is to prescribe, monitor, and adjust medications underneath a physician's supervision. So, a document is drawn up, medications are selected, and an algorithm so to speak is put together so that a pharmacist can treat a patient independently of a physician needing to be there. Dr Greg Hundley: Very nice. And did you find in the pharmacist-led group that these patients were taking a different anti-hypertensive regimen, or were they more compliant? What do you think was the reason for the discrepancy in this magnificent blood pressure drop in this group of hypertensive men? Dr Florian Rader: So clearly, there were a lot of differences between the two groups. First of all, we had a protocol with our favorite blood pressure medications that we use clinically here in the hypertension center at Cedars-Sinai. Essentially it is long-acting calcium channel blocker, specifically Amlodipine, longer-acting angiotensin receptor blockers, or ACE inhibitors, and a third line, usually a thiazide diuretic, and also a longer-acting one, not the usual Hydrochlorothiazide, but specifically Indapamide that we used for this research study. Dr Greg Hundley: And do you think that there was more compliance in this pharmacist-led group? Dr Florian Rader: One would expect that. First of all, I think that seeing the clinical pharmacist, more frequently being reminded of taking the medications, having feedback by actually seeing the blood pressure numbers in the barber shop, I think would help. But then, in addition, we choose these medications not only because they affect it, but also because they're easy to take. They're once-a-day medications with very high continuation rates in larger studies, so they're just easier to take than other medications that are oftentimes prescribed. Dr Greg Hundley: It sounds like also, there might have been a trust factor. Because you're seeing the same person over and over in a very nice environment. Was that a factor? Dr Ciantel Blyler: Absolutely. I think there's a different level of trust that's established when you meet somebody on their own turf. So I think the fact that we met men in barber shops where they felt comfortable, where many of them had been going to the same barber for over a decade, it made all the difference in terms of establishing a rapport, and gaining their trust with respect to having them take medications. So, I think that was a huge part of why we saw increased adherence, and really sort of a commitment to the program. Dr Greg Hundley: And we certainly recognize how harmful hypertension is in individuals of Black race. How does this group in Los Angeles translate to perhaps other Black men in the United States? Particularly, for example, in the South. Dr Ciantel Blyler: I think the program could translate really anywhere. I think what makes it so tailored to African-American men is this notion of going into a barber shop, which is a very important place in the Black community. So, again, sort of going back to what I said earlier, most of these men had been seeing the same barber as frequently as almost every two weeks for over a decade. So, it really helps increase the frequency with which we could interact with the men, and it helped with continued follow-up and adherence to the program. With respect to the area of the country again, I think it translates. Dr Carolyn Lam: I've got a follow-up question to that, if you don't mind. So, I'm here listening all the way from Singapore, and I'm just so impressed, and frankly just enamored by this study. And wondering what is the barber shop to my local Chinese guy? I'm actually wondering if it's the kafei dian and that stands for coffee shop, and I'm also wondering what about the women? Wanpen, do you have any insights that you want to share? Dr Wanpen Vongpatanasin: I believe that even Dr Victor had thought about the beauty shops, that is a barber shop study in parallel, and this could very well work very well. Who knows, we could be going to massage parlor, anywhere, that when we feel relaxed and be ourselves, we go out our way, out of our regular activity, and it could really be a neat idea. And for a study, I'm not sure I could do something out of the box. I would say it must have been successful as this approach, and partly it could be because of the additional pharmacists engage likely. So, I think this is a perfect combination. Dr Greg Hundley: Wanpen, you had mentioned Ron Victor. Maybe Ciantel, Florian, and Wanpen, you used to work with him. What did Ron mean to this study? Ron Victor unfortunately passed away this past Fall. Dr Florian Rader: Ron hired me almost seven years ago now straight out of fellowship. He was personally my mentor. He taught me all the tricks when it comes to the work of the management of hypertension, so personally I owe him a lot. Regarding the study, he's been thinking about this for a long time, this approach to hypertension management. He's tried it in Dallas. It worked partially, but not very well because he didn't have a pharmacist, and he didn't have somebody that made it their goal to lower blood pressure no matter what. And in this study, we had somebody like that, the clinical pharmacist. So, Ron Victor has thought about this for a long time, has done a lot of analysis of the Dallas hypertension study, and figured out why it didn't work…

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Circulation Fellows-in-Training Podcast Dec 24, 2018

Show notes

Dr Amit Khera: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly summary and backstage pass to the journal. I'm Dr Amit Khera, associate editor and digital strategies editor from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. And I have the privilege of standing in for Dr Carolyn Lam, your usual weekly podcast host. Today we have a special treat. It is our semiannual fellows and training FIT podcast. And the additional part of this treat is we have three very special FITs today. These are our assistant editors for social media for Circulation. And really I want to introduce you just a moment, but I want to thank these three for their hard work and efforts. It really is them that helped bring our social media to life. And importantly for us, we really have a commitment to enhancing fellow education involving fellows in our editorial process and really making sure that the journal is appealing to fellows in training. So we really rely on these three to help us understand what best resonates and what is most helpful for fellows in training. So without further ado, Jainy Savla from UT Southwestern. Welcome Jainy. Jainy Savla: Thanks for having me on the podcast today. Dr Amit Khera: And we have Daniel Ambinder from Johns Hopkins University. Hi Dan. Daniel Ambinder: Hey Amit. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. Dr Amit Khera: Absolutely. And finally we have Jeff Hsu from UCLA. Hi Jeff. Jeff Hsu: Hi Amit and hi everyone. Very glad to be here. Dr Amit Khera: Well, Jainy, I'm going to start with you. You've been with us on the social media side the longest. I think it's maybe almost a year or a bit more that you've been working on these efforts. And again, very much appreciate all of your hard work and insight. Tell us a bit about yourself. Jainy Savla: So I'm currently a research fellow at UT Southwestern. So I completed my general cardiology training and I've been doing some extra research training in one of our basic science labs there. Dr Amit Khera: So not surprisingly with your background, do you select an article? So we've asked them each to select one article as they've been working through the social media side and see all of our articles come through. Each to select one that they found was interesting and perhaps summarize for us what it included and what appealed to them. So Jainy, tell us a little bit about the article you chose and why you chose it. Jainy Savla: So, I chose one of the articles that was published in April of 2018 from the Molkentin team lab. And this is a basic science article that focused on which types of cells contribute to heart regeneration. They hadn't thought that there was cardiac progenitor cell that could contribute to the development of new cardiomyocytes. And more recent data has shown that maybe that's not quite the case. So what this study did was used a lot of fancy lineage tracing models to try to figure out which types of cells we're actually contributing to the development of new cardiomyocytes. So importantly, what came from this was that one of their models, they were able to delete two transcription factors that are necessary for cardiomyocytes to develop from these progenitor cells. But they found that when they did that, they even got a higher number of cardiomyocytes that formed. And then what they were able to show in this paper was that actually comes from fusion of leukocytes to cardiomyocytes. And then interestingly, they found a role for one of these transcription factors and the development of endothelial cells. So that was kind of a new, not known function of one of these genes that was previously thought to be just contributory to cardiac development. Dr Amit Khera: It's really a fascinating article when you think about it. Most of the science we publish are people bringing to light new discoveries and certainly there was a component of that here. But in many ways, it was kind of a different article where there had been this a prevailing thought about these c kit positive cells and here they're actually had gone through, refuted what people had thought was happening with these in this de novo cardiomyocyte formation. So you'll see that very often where people's articles or work is headed out to sort of maybe refute or set right what's happening in the literature in the field. Can you comment on that as to that type of article and how that appealed to you in this study? Jainy Savla: That is interesting because previously it has meant that these cells can be used as a therapeutic option in human patients. But some of them were recent data showed that perhaps the new cardiomyocytes weren't actually coming from these cells, but it was hard to say. So the nice part about this paper was really they used a lot of important lineage tracing models to really show where these cells are coming from. And it helped clarify some of the, I guess, more confusing science that had been in the field since there were a few papers that showed these cells were contributary and then a few papers that have shown that maybe they weren't. So I think that's really helpful, particularly when you're talking about things that could be potentially used as therapeutic agents in human. And also the interesting thing is that while these cells themselves may not be useful to perhaps harvest and give to someone, you could potentially alter these cells and then they produce cells that fuse with cardiomyocytes. Or could you use this a different way? So I thought that was also interesting about this article. Dr Amit Khera: Great points in it. It does remind us again that in our enthusiasm for rushing things to clinical practices in some things in this field, the importance of rigorous basic science to really understand the molecular underpinnings. And as you mentioned, there's some new insights here that could be used for clinical therapeutic purposes in the future. So definitely an interesting article and glad you enjoyed it and brought it to our attention. I'm going to ask you a bit of a different question. You again have been working with this in the social media side for longer. You've seen this now for some time about the different articles that come through. I know you and I've had several conversations about our different platforms, Twitter or Facebook, and how they're different and how we engage with them and how we engage with the audience. Can you tell us a little bit just reflecting now on your time and working with social media from a journal perspective, kind of what you've learned? What are some interesting observations over this year? Jainy Savla: Definitely one interesting observation is just that their general usage of these social media platforms has increased significantly since I've started doing this. And you can see this with when we get articles that are accepted, how many authors have Twitter handles that they'd like to be tagged in some of these posts. And that's just gone up significantly since I've started doing this. And that also changes sort of what the comments we get on some of the posts and the back and forth discussions that we're seeing on these platforms. And then the second thing I found really interesting over time is that the way people use Facebook is really different from the way people use Twitter. And you can follow the discussions that people have linked to our posts a little bit better on Facebook. And then on Twitter, there's also a lot of similar discussions about these posts. But they kind of manifest in different ways and it's really interesting to see how that plays out. Dr Amit Khera: I think those are fantastic points. And from a fellow's perspective, how do you think fellows are engaging with social media now compared to maybe, I don't know, when you started your training a few years back. What have you seen in a positive light? Jainy Savla: I mean in general, there are more fellows on Twitter now than when I was a first-year fellow. Even myself, I've got my Twitter account when I was in fellowship. I didn't have one prior to that. I mean it's interesting because people are able to showcase their work a little bit better I think with these types of handles whereas before maybe you wouldn't know that even one of your own co fellows had published something. So it's kind of nice to see people use that kind of as a networking tool in some ways or to showcase some of their own work, which is something that when I was a first year and I didn't have a Twitter handle and there weren't as many fellows on Twitter, I didn't really notice some of the work that's being done by some of my colleagues at my level. Dr Amit Khera: Those are great points and I'll stoplight some of the things you just said talking about it being a way for fellows to really showcase their work, to help with networking and in some ways, it's sort of the great equalizer. So I think it's really a valuable platform specifically for fellows. Well thank you Jainy. I'm going to move on to Daniel and hear a little bit from Daniel. Tell us a bit about yourself. Daniel Ambinder: I'm currently a second year cardiology fellow at John's Hopkins Hospital and I plan on doing interventional and structural cardiology in the future. Dr Amit Khera: Great and certainly a lively and growing field and so many exciting things happening. Well, it's interesting you chose an article today that is more of a clinical article and obviously quite different than the last one we heard, but equally as interesting. Tell us a little about the article you've chose and why you chose it. Daniel Ambinder: I was very excited about this article that was published in Circulation back in July 2018. So, it's by Dr Borlaug and Reddy on how to diagnose HFpEF and what they did was they took patients with clinical dyspnea and they used invasive human dynamics to kind of assess whether or not they had HFpEF. And by doing so they were able to generate a list of clinical and eco based guidance to help us kind of identify patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. So they came up with this amazing little table which was featured in Circulation and on Circulation twitter, where they have a chart that basically goes through several clinical variables including weight and hypertensiveness, atrial fibrillation, pulmonary hypertension, being elderly. And filling pressure is based on echo cardiographic information. And by that they were able to generate a score and give you a probability of if your patient has HFpEF or not. And the reason why I really enjoyed reading this article and also posting this article was because going through internal medicine and not being so fundamentally aware of echo and kind of what goes into understanding left ventricular filling pressures, it was challenging to make a diagnosis of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Do you just basically say, "My patient has lower extremity swelling but normal EF? They have heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and [inaudible 00:09:32] on the [inaudible 00:09:33]. And so I thought that this would be really helpful to the medical community at large. And in fact, shortly after we posted it, I saw that our cardiology console fellow is actually utilizing this exact table to help one of the medicine teams manage a patient with lower extremity swelling and come to the diagnosis of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. So that is why I chose this article for today. Dr Amit Khera: That's a great article and I thought you summarized it very well. And it is a field. HFpEF you'd see a lot of articles in Circulation on this topic. We have many people that are interested from an editor's level but also from a society level. This is a huge problem, but we know very, very little. And I'm sure you know that as well and this was a wonderful tool. Just shows you're sort of the beauty and simplicity. Although if you read it, the message were pretty rigorous and they had a lot of great work that they did to develop it. But I love that the H2 HFpEF, how they basically came up with it h for heavy and the f from fibrillation. So I thought that was incredibly creative and a very simplistic but useful score. So, you said your, tell us about yourself. Have you used the H2 of the HFpEF score yet? Daniel Ambinder: Absolutely. I use it in clinic on a daily basis. And I actually pull up the Tweet in my office and show the patients why I think that they have heart failure preserved ejection fraction, especially since many of my patients start to get really nervous when you start talking about heart failure. But then they don't understand that they have a normal functioning heart. They can't really put those two together. And so going through this chart and going through the etiology, or at least what we know about heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, turns out to be quite helpful. Dr Amit Khera: And the basis of this study goes back to hemodynamics. This obviously is a cohort where they had done invasive hemodynamics to essentially diagnosed HFpEF based on pressure. So as you, as someone who's going interventional and structural where we are really seeing kind of the rebirth or refocus on hemodynamics again, tell me a little bit like what you're learning in terms of hemodynamics and how you think that importance in today's practice of cardiovascular medicine. Daniel Ambinder: One of my passions is spending as much time as I possibly can in the cardiac ICU. And we're fortunate to meet many different patients that come in with very different kinds of cardiogenic shock for other hemodynamic compromise from other types of shock. And I have found it extremely helpful to think about either using a virtual Swan or by actually getting the measurements with a PA catheter to kind of identify where the break in the system is to hopefully provide our patients with the ability to turn them around in a fast manner before they develop metabolic compromise from prolonged hypoperfusion. Dr Amit Khera: Great summary of how you're using hemodynamics and the training. And I'm going to pivot. The last question for you is when we first met I think several months back and we're communicating about your interest in social media, one thing that was really interesting and fascinating was the great work you're doing on Twitter on your own account where you essentially, if I think you told me this right, you sit on your iPhone and basically in this matter of a very few minutes would construct cases and teaching points on Twitter. So tell me a little bit about that, about using Twitter for medical education and learning cardiology and cases. And I know you're passionate about that. So tell us a little bit more about that. Daniel Ambinder: Back in May, last year, I had been in my first year of cardiology fellowship. And I was really kind of obsessed with grabbing as much imaging and cases as I could to construct them into teaching stories to share these important stories that I encounter with other people. And so also share the aha moments that I have when I'm learning from my mentors about a new clinical condition or even a clinical condition that I've encountered many times. We never thought about any unique way. And so I was putting these all together and developing somewhat of a library of cases. But I would share them with the residents that I was working with at the time. And then Dr Erin Michos was one of my mentors at Hopkins. She's an echocardiographer and she kind of exposed me to the Twitter community where you're really able to just start reaching out to different people and s…

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Circulation December 18, 2018 Issue Dec 17, 2018

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. In today's feature discussion, we will be doing a deep dive into the LEADER trial results, looking at new results of liraglutide and its effects in patients with type two diabetes, with or without a history of myocardial infarction or stroke. All of that coming right up after these summaries. In today's issue, five groups of investigators in two original basic research articles and three research letters tackled the same biological question, and all reached the same conclusion that cells in the heart expressing the SCA-1 cell surface antigen do not become cardiomyocytes to any meaningful degree, and instead become endothelial cells. Among the original basic papers, first author Dr Vagnozzi, corresponding author Dr Molkentin from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and their colleagues use the inducible recombinase method and generated a constitutive recombinase at the SCA-1 locus. They found that cardiac resident SCA-1 positive cells were not significant contributors to cardiomyocyte renewal in vivo. Instead, SCA-1 positive cells generated cardiac vasculature throughout development, during aging, and following injury with trivial contribution to the cardiomyocyte population. In the second paper from co-first authors, Drs Zhang and Sultana, with corresponding author Dr Cai from Indiana University School of Medicine and colleagues, these authors engineered a series of genetically altered mice to identify and track SCA-1 positive cells in the heart, and found that SCA-1 positive cells were purely of the endothelial lineage. Together with three research letters, these five papers add to the growing body of evidence that in adult mammals, our new cardiomyocytes arise from preexisting cardiomyocytes and rarely, if at all, from adult cardiac stem cells. Could metformin be cardioprotective in patients with type one diabetes? Co-first authors Drs Bjornstad and Schafer, corresponding author Dr Nadeau from University of Colorado School of Medicine, and their colleagues hypothesized that adolescents with type one diabetes have impaired vascular function, and that metformin may improve insulin resistance and vascular dysfunction. To test this hypothesis, they studied 48 adolescents with type one diabetes and 24 non-diabetic controls using MRI of the ascending and descending aorta, as well as assessment of carotid intima-medial thickness by ultrasound, brachial distance ability by DynaPulse, fat and lean mass by DXA, fasting labs following overnight glycemic control, and insulin sensitivity by hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp. The adolescents with type one diabetes were randomized one as to one to three months of 2000 milligrams metformin or placebo daily, after which the baseline measures were repeated. The authors detected early signs of cardiovascular disease with MRI in these adolescents with type one diabetes compared to controls. They further found that three months of metformin therapy improved insulin sensitivity as assessed by gold standard hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp, both in normal weight and obese adolescents with type one diabetes. Moreover, metformin improved carotid intima-medial thickness and aortic wall shear stress and stiffness. Thus, metformin may hold promise as a cardioprotective intervention in type one diabetes. What are the clinical genetic and environmental determinants of varicose vein formation? Co-first authors Drs Fukaya and Flores, corresponding author Dr Leeper from Stanford University, and colleagues applied machine learning to agnostically search for risk factors of varicose veins in nearly half a million individuals in the UK bio bank. They found that greater height appeared as a novel predictor of varicose vein disease in machine learning analyses, and was independently associated in multi-variable adjusted Cox regression. Using Mendelian randomization, they demonstrated that greater height had a causal role in varicose vein development. A genome-wide association study identified 30 new genome-wide significant loci, identifying pathways involved in vascular development, and skeletal/limb biology, and discovering a strong genetic correlation between varicose veins and deep vein thrombosis. The knowledge greatly expands our understanding of disease pathophysiology, and may help future improvements in the management of varicose veins and their associated complications. The final original paper describes the effect of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist liraglutide on cardiovascular events, and all-cause mortality in patients with type two diabetes and chronic kidney disease. First and corresponding author Dr Mann from Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen in Germany and their colleagues performed a post hoc analysis of the LEADER trial comparing the liraglutide's treatment effects in patients with and without kidney disease. As a reminder, LEADER was designed to recruit a subgroup of at least 660 patients with an estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR, less than 60, approximately 220 patients with severe renal impairment, eGFR less than 30, and at least 440 patients with moderate renal impairment with an eGFR of 30 to 60. The authors found that the liraglutide reduced the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events, and all-cause mortality compared with placebo in patients with chronic kidney disease defined as an eGFR less than 60, and also in patients with albuminuria defined as a urinary albumin to creatinine ratio above 30. The overall risk of adverse events did not differ between the liraglutide and placebo treated patients either with or without chronic kidney disease in the LEADER trial. In summary, these results show that liraglutide added to standard of care reduced the risk of major cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality in patients with type two diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Furthermore, these results appear to apply across the chronic kidney disease spectrum that was enrolled. And that brings us to the end of our summaries. Now for this week's feature discussion. Cardiovascular outcome trials have transformed the world of treating patients with diabetes. And for our feature discussion today, we're going to be talking about a new analysis from a very important trial, the LEADER trial of GLP-1 receptor agonists, and that's the liraglutide. I'm very proud to have the corresponding author of this paper with us, Dr Subodh Verma, and he's from St Michael's Hospital and University of Toronto, and our senior associate editor, Dr Gabriel Steg, from University of Paris. Actually, Gabriel, I'm actually going to start with you for once because I recall perhaps something you may have written about cardiovascular outcome trials. Dr Gabriel Steg: Yeah, it's really funny. I'll try to take it graciously. You know, I wrote a frame of reference in Circulation a few years ago, wondering whether we were doing good by doing all these large outcome trials for safety with new anti-diabetic drugs, because there had been not one but two, three, four, five, six trials that were essentially neutral, enrolling more than 107 patients and participants at the expense of millions of dollars, and not much came out of it. And this was published in circulation. I was very happy until the next trial comes up, and this is EMPA-REG. And the next one is LEADER. And we have two trials that literally transform our vision of anti-diabetic agents as major agents for cardiovascular prevention. The trial we're going to discuss today, which you wrote about, is one of these trials. And I think I have to revisit my own writings and probably eat my hat. Dr Carolyn Lam: So indeed, that's a great segue. Thank you, Gabriel. And Subodh, tell us then, what did you look at this time in LEADER? And maybe start by saying a little bit about LEADER, and the rationale for doing this particular sub analysis. Dr Subodh Verma: Right. So, as Dr Steg mentioned, these were FDA-mandated studies to look at safety and potential efficacy of newer antihyperglycemic agents. The entire premise was that cardiologists and cardiovascular specialists were not really getting that excited about antihyperglycemic therapies in people with diabetes, because there was no data that they did much. And as Dr Steg mentioned, even the data leading up to some of these trials were disappointing, suggesting that they're safe, but they neither reduce nor increase events. So, I think EMPA-REG and LEADER really changed the calculus in many ways of how we look at cardiovascular risk reduction with antihyperglycemic agents. LEADER was a trial that was 9,340 patients. These are patients that were at high cardiovascular risk, but unlike EMPA-REG that only enrolled people with prior to ischemic cardiovascular events ICAD, PAD, and CVD, LEADER took a position of enriching the population with this spectrum of patients with cardiovascular disease and risk factors. So, some were in so-called high risk primary prevention who had not had established ASCVD, but had multiple risk factors such as uncontrolled hypertension or chronic kidney disease. Some had evidence of ASCVD, but had not had a prior myocardial infarction. And some, in fact, had had a prior MI stroke or PAD. So, it was a broad population of patients that was enrolled. And the primary result, again, for the primary outcome of MACE, demonstrated a significant reduction in favor of liraglutide versus placebo. And then for the individual components of that primary outcome, they were all statistically significant, or at least went in the right direction. Importantly, CV death was reduced by 22% with liraglutide versus placebo. I would like to emphasize that in this day and age, and Dr Steg has nicely set the stage, we have started thinking about how do we think about cardiovascular phenotypes of patients. You know, is a drug more likely to reduce heart failure? More likely to reduce ischemic events? And with LEADER, we found that in fact the trial actually reduced mostly ischemic events, and was really not that beneficial on heart failure related outcomes. So, that was the broad positive outcome from LEADER. They've led to guideline changes worldwide that patients with diabetes should be prioritized to receive an agent that has shown benefit, particularly if they have cardiovascular disease. And one of those agents was empagliflozin. The other was liraglutide. But, secondary prevention is a pretty crowded space, and not everybody can get everything, and not everybody should get everything, and not everybody can afford everything. So, I think leaders like the two of you here are often thinking about, how do you risk-stratify these populations, and how do we start thinking about people who are at greater risk, people who can actually derive benefit? And I think that's the smart and thoughtful way of doing this. And is there a certain threshold at which point the therapy loses its ability to reduce cardiovascular events, at least in the short term? So, in that theme, in that vein, what we looked at here was an analysis of people in LEADER who truly had a prior ischemic event. And the work that Dr Steg and others have done in REACH registries, etc. clearly establish that that's a population of patients, type two diabetes and a prior ischemic event. You don't really need many more calculators beyond that. That's the highest risk population. And then, the next level is really type two diabetes with a ASCVD. And we know that from REACH as well, that that's the next level of risk. And then, what about people who have type two diabetes just by itself? Which certainly are much higher risk than people who don't have diabetes, but we didn't have a non-diabetic group to compare to. And what we find is that the higher the baseline risk defined by this, the greater is the absolute risk reduction. The P value is consistent for ... You know, this is non-significant for heterogeneity. but specifically, people with a prior ischemic event derive benefit. People without a prior ischemic event who've had ASCVD derive significant benefit. But, in fact, we found that the curves were almost superimposable for people who did not have prior ASCVD. And that's not to say the GLP-1 receptor agonists should not be used in diabetes in the absence of cardiovascular disease, because they're great glucose lowering agents. They cause hypoglycemia, they cause weight loss. And potentially, within longer exposure times, cardiovascular benefit may actually emerge. And we've heard data from Dr Gerstein's study called Rewind that is positive, that will be presented next year. Harmony Outcomes was a study that was presented recently that also showed a benefit. So, whether in the primary prevention group we see a benefit in the future remains to be seen. Dr Carolyn Lam: Oh, that's a great, great summary. But Subodh, you know, it's become a bit of what do we define as a primary and secondary prevention anymore, you know? And the patient that already got type two diabetes. Now, in this paper, it's very nice. As you said, has a history of myocardial infarction and stroke. And maybe I could just clarify to the audience, you couldn't just pick up the primary paper and see that because the way the inclusion exclusion criteria were designed in LEADER, you can't just pick up the sub-groups. So, this specific analysis, so carefully and wonderfully done, was absolutely needed. But then you know, what do you think? What's primary and what's secondary prevention anymore? Dr Gabriel Steg: Well, I want to commend the authors for doing the careful stratification of diabetic patients they've done in the paper, and particularly for pointing out that it's one thing to have had an event where you actually ruptured a plaque and had a traumatic event. And it's very different from merely having plaque in one of your carotids or your arteries, and which is, of course, in turn very different from the majority of diabetic patients who have neither an event, nor diagnosed plaque or established plaque. And when we think about preventing cardiovascular and diabetes, we have to remember that the outer circle, the broader circle of diabetic patients who haven't had disease is the largest component. Dr Subodh Verma: True. Dr Gabriel Steg: And these are the patients whom we treat every day with the hope of eventually keeping them from harm, safe from harm, or with therapies that are new and potentially beneficial. And I think your research very clearly shows that there's a gradient of benefit. The sicker the patient, the greater the benefit in preventing MACE. And as long as you get to more healthier phenotypes of diabetes, then there is less of a benefit. Which doesn't mean that we shouldn't use these agents. As you point out, they're very convenient and effective agents for glucose control. But then, their cardiovascular benefits are more uncertain. And I think this is the key message from this analysis, and it's a great analysis. Dr Subodh Verma: Thank you. I appreciate that. I totally agree that for the doctor in the trenches, particularly the cardiologist who's just trying to get their feet wet with antihyperglycemic therapy, you know? Cardiologists will embrace PCSK9 inhibitors and rivaroxaban at low dose, and maybe a new way of doing surgery or putting an LVAD. But it's very hard to get their attention when it comes to antihyperglycemic therapy. So, defining for them the population that matters the most, where the great…

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Circulation December 11, 2018 issue Dec 10, 2018

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. What are the long-term effects of oxygen therapy in patients with suspected acute myocardial infarction? Well, to find out, stay tuned for our discussion of our feature paper this week, coming right up after these summaries. The first two original papers demonstrate that, similar to neonatal mice, one day old and two-day old neonatal pigs are capable of mounting a cardiac regenerative response following myocardial infarction, which is characterized by restoration of contractile function, cardiomyocyte replenishment, and minimal fibrosis. Now, interestingly, this regenerative capacity is lost after the first two days of life. The first paper is from co-corresponding authors, Drs Yeh and Cook from National Heart Research Institute of Singapore and National Heart Center, Singapore, and the second from co-corresponding, authors Drs Zhang and Zhu from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. These authors report collectively that proliferation of preexisting cardiomyocytes appear to be the primary source of cardiomyocyte replenishment in neonatal pigs with markers of cardiomyocyte mitosis, sarcomere disassembly, and cytokinesis elevated following injury in the one day and two-day old hearts, but not at later time points. Furthermore, cardiomyocyte DNA synthesis was increased following neonatal pig myocardial infarction. Cardiomyocyte proliferation significantly decreased after this two-day window, which was associated with a marked reduction in telomerase activity. Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction may look different in the young compared to that in the elderly. First author, Dr Jasper Tromp, corresponding author, myself, Carolyn Lam from the National Heart Center, Singapore and Duke National University of Singapore, and our colleagues from the Asian Heart Failure Registry studied more than 1,200 patients with HEF PEF from 11 Asian regions and found that 37% of our Asian HEF PEF population was under 65 years of age. Younger age was associated with male preponderance, a higher prevalence of obesity, and less renal impairment, atrial fibrillation, and hypertension. Left ventricular filling pressures and the prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy was similar in the very young of less than 55 years and elderly HEF PEF of more than 75 years of age. Compared to age matched controls from the community without heart failure, the very young HEF PEF patients had a three-fold higher death rate and twice the prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy. Thus, young and very young patients with HEF PEF display similar adverse cardiac remodeling as their older counterparts, but very poor outcomes compared to controls without heart failure. Obesity may be a major driver of HEF PEF in a high proportion of HEF PEF in the young and very young. How important is hospitalization for heart failure as a complication of diabetes? In the next paper from first and corresponding author, Dr McAllister from University of Glasgow, the authors examined the incidents and case fatality of heart failure hospitalizations in the entire population age 30 years and older resident in Scotland during 2004 to 2013. Over the 10-year period of study, among 3.25 million people, the coot incidence rates of heart failure hospitalization were 2.4 per thousand-person years for those without diabetes, 12.4 for those with type two diabetes, and 5.6 for those with type one diabetes. Heart failure incidents had fallen over time for people with and without diabetes, but remained around two times higher in people with diabetes than those without diabetes. Heart failure case fatality was higher in people with type one diabetes. Duration of diabetes and glycated hemoglobin was associated with increased risk of heart failure in type one and type two diabetes. Thus, clinicians should be aware of the importance of heart failure and diabetes, especially in type one diabetes where this is under appreciated. What are epigenetic mechanisms contributing to ischemia reperfusion injury? Co-first authors Dr Yu, Yang, and Zhang, co-corresponding authors, Dr Xu from Nanjing Medical University, Dr Sun from Fudan University, and Dr Ge from Fudan University, and their colleagues evaluated the potential role of megakaryocytic leukemia one, or MKL 1, as a bridge linking epigenetic activation of NAD pH oxidases, or NOX, to reactive oxygen species production and cardiac ischemia reperfusion injury in mice. They found that genetic deletion of pharmaceutical inhibition of MKL 1 attenuated cardiac ischemia reperfusion injury in mice. MKL 1 levels were elevated in macrophages, but not in cardiomyocytes in vivo, following cardiac ischemia reperfusion injury. MKL 1 recruited the histone acetyltransferase, MOF, to activate NOX transcription in macrophages. Pharmaceutical inhibition of MOF attenuated cardiac ischemia reperfusion injury in mice, and pharmaceutical inhibition of NOX one or four attenuated cardiac ischemia reperfusion injury as well. These findings provide a novel link between MKL 1-mediated epigenetic regulation of gene expression in macrophages and ischemic heart disease. This opens the door to small molecule compounds targeting the MKL 1 MOF NOX access as a novel therapeutic strategy against ischemic heart disease. Is the time from last hospitalization for heart failure to placement of a primary prevention ICD associated with patient outcomes? First and corresponding author Dr Ambrosy from the Permanente Medical Group in San Francisco performed a post hoc analysis of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in the national Cardiovascular Data Registries implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD registry, all with a known diagnosis of heart failure and an ejection fraction of less than 35%, undergoing a new ICD placement for primary prevention. They found that older patients, currently or recently hospitalized for heart failure, undergoing initial ICD placement for primary prevention, experienced a higher rate of periprocedural complications and were at increased risk of death compared to those receiving an ICD without recent heart failure hospitalization. Additional prospective real world pragmatic comparative effectiveness studies should be conducted to define the optimal timing of ICD placement. The final original paper presents result of the VERDICT trial, a large scale randomized controlled trial evaluating the value of very early invasive strategy conducted within 12 hours of diagnosis on long term clinical outcomes in patients with non-SD elevation acute coronary syndrome. First and corresponding author Dr Kofoed from University of Copenhagen and colleagues studied 2,147 patients who were randomized and found that an invasive strategy performed within 4.7 hours after diagnosis was not associated with improved outcomes, compared to an invasive strategy conducted within two to three days. However, in the pre-specified subgroup of patients with a GRACE risk score of more than 140, a very early invasive treatment strategy did appear to improve outcomes, compared to a standard invasive treatment strategy. And that wraps it up for our summaries. Now, for our feature discussion. For our feature discussion today, we are talking about oxygen therapy for patients with suspected acute myocardial infarction. Something that seems so benign, something we've taken for granted, and yet now we now question since the Detox AMI trial. Well, for today's feature paper, we have a follow-up of this trial, and I'm so pleased to have actually our associate editor, but also author of this paper, Dr Stefan James from Uppsala Clinical Research Center, and the guest editor for this paper, Dr David Morrow, who's from Brigham Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. So, thank you both for being here. Stefan, could I just ask you to start by taking us back. How was Detox AMI first conceived? What made you even question oxygen therapy? And then, perhaps then, tell us about what this new paper adds. Dr Stefan James: I think that's so interesting because I think we all learned in medical school that for myocardial infarction, you should always deliver oxygen. That's sort of the first choice. And the other sort of first choice that we learned was morphine. Some of the other important things that we learned was to give not only oxygen but morphine, and nitroglycerin, and perhaps aspirin. And by those four, only aspirin is really the agent that has been proven beneficial to patients. But we thought for many years actually about this oxygen hypothesis, or we were interested in trying to understand, is it really helpful to give patients oxygen? Or are we in fact harming patients? Because there is, as you may know, there is a metanalysis performed long ago with small trials on the fibrinolysis era that showed actually a threefold increased risk of dying in those patients who had received oxygen in randomized various small trials, and their animal experience actually suggesting that oxygen is also hazardous. You don't think about that so often, but it's really an agent that constricts arteries, and so as the arteries close by a clot in myocardial infarction, there is no way the oxygen that you breathe in your nose can reach the suffering myocardium. It actually contracts the arteries, and may make the infarct larger than it would be otherwise. Dr Carolyn Lam: I love that explanation. Alright, so what did you find in the current analysis of longer term results? Dr Stefan James: So, we performed this, the main oxygen trial that we call Detox. We built it upon our national registries, and so we decided to include not only MI patients, but patients who were suspected of MI, in order to be able to enroll patients before the diagnosis was clear. We didn't want to wait for troponins, so we enrolled patients in the ambulances, in the emergency departments, in the cath labs, or in the wards, patients who had suspected myocardial infarction. Most of them, eventually, did have myocardial infarction, but a proportion did not have myocardial infarction. They had other diseases that resembles MI and have breathing problems. And we selected the cut point of 90%. We said if they are below 90%, they're hypoxic, and it would be unethical to withdraw oxygen, if you were hypoxic. So, we sort of arbitrarily selected the cut point of 90%. And then, we randomized patients to receive oxygen or do not receive oxygen. We considered to do double blind, but in order to do a double blind, you need to provide air on a mask. And air is not available in ambulances or in the emergency department. We cannot put a mask without anything in it because then it will feel more difficult to breathe. So, we had actually oxygen versus nothing, and we enrolled all patients coming to the cath labs, and emergency departments, and ambulances in Sweden. And thanks to the infrastructure that we have built on the national registries, we were able to enroll these to conduct this large trial, larger than any other trial, 6,600 patients. In the main study, we found no benefit, and fortunately, no harm of providing oxygen for our primary end point, which was all caused death. But we realized that we were little bit underpowered actually to really clearly rule out that there was any benefit on the primary endpoints. And so, we said, we probably need a longer follow-up, and we probably also need other important measures such as heart failure. Because we thought that oxygen may, if it works, it may reduce the infarct size and may result in a lower risk of heart failure in the long-term. We don't believe that we will reduce the risk of re-MI because we're not interfering with atherosclerosis or plaque ruptures, but we may interfere with the development of heart failure. So, in this particular paper, we said, longer follow up in order for patients to possibly develop heart failure and increase their risk of heart failure hospitalizations. So, in this paper, we used as a primary endpoint of this analysis, death or hospitalization for heart failure, post MI. And with this way of calculating events, we are more sure that we are not underpowered for this evaluation. Dr Carolyn Lam: Right. And the results? Dr Stefan James: The results were completely neutral. There was no benefit at all in any sub group. It doesn't matter if you were ST elevation MI, or no ST elevation MI, or no MI, or high risk prior MI, prior heart failure, respiratory disease, there is no benefits and no harm, which is good. And those results are supported by our findings on troponin levels. So, we checked troponins repeatedly. I shouldn't say top troponin, but the highest measured, we did not find any difference between the two groups in Troponin elevations. And we did not find any difference in LVEF and in Echo performed during the initial hospitalization. So, I think both of those results support the primary endpoint of death and repeat hospitalization for heart failure. Dr Carolyn Lam: So David, you've thought a lot about this, and also framed it so nicely when we were just talking a little bit earlier. What do you think is the real significance of this paper on so many levels? Dr David Morrow: Yeah, I think there are many levels. I think it's such important work because it takes something that we are still doing in many hospitals every day for patients and is difficult to study because it's become part of standard of care, as Dr James pointed out, and so the authors are to be congratulated for being able to study this intervention. And I think in additionally because it is a therapy that's not associated with high cost, has been part of our care for so long, it's not one where there is the support for a large type of randomized trials. So, the ability to perform this with relatively low costs by nesting it in a registry is important, not only for this particular test, but also as a model for future research of so many interventions that we make right now where they started in a time where our threshold for a need for data was much less. Dr Carolyn Lam: Yeah. Indeed. That's wonderfully put. I am also really struck. It's the importance of the message, but also especially about how you do a pragmatic registry-based randomized trial. The ability of Sweden to do this, it's just rock the world, right? Because we really need solutions like that for our clinical trial world, which has to be sustainable somehow. Could you maybe take us behind the scenes a little bit? I mean you did already in your description. I didn't realize there were so many considerations when you're planning this, but how easy or difficult is it to do a trial like this? Dr Stefan James: We call the entity RRCT. We call it registry based randomized trial, but being aware that there is no strict definition of what is a registry based randomized trial. So, sometimes for some simple interventions like strategies, we can use only the registry for collection of baseline variables, procedure variables, and also outcomes. The registry can really do everything. The only thing we need to add is a randomization, so then we just program into the registry, which is used live in front of the patients. So, when I enter a patient in the registry, the personal identification number collects me to the population registry that supports directly back to me name and gender of the patient, and then I enter all the baseline characteristics anyway in the registry. And then, there is a question that comes up that screens my patients. So, the system proposes to me to randomize patients who are eligible because I programmed the inclusion/exclusion criteria. So, it propo…

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Circulation December 4, 2018 Issue Dec 03, 2018

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Our featured paper this week reports the five-year clinical outcomes and valve durability in the largest available cohort to date of consecutive high-risk patients undergoing transcatheter aortic valve replacement. You must listen up for this discussion, coming right up after these summaries. The first original paper describes a personalized risk assessment platform that promotes the implementation of precision medicine by helping us with the evaluation of a genomic variant of uncertain significance. A genomic variant of uncertain significance is a rare or novel variant for which disease pathogenicity has not been conclusively demonstrated or excluded and thus cannot be definitively annotated. These variants therefore pose critical challenges to the clinical interpretation and risk assessment. New methods are therefore urgently needed to better characterize their pathogenicity. Co-first authors, Dr Ma, Zhang, and Itzhaki, corresponding author Dr Wu from Stanford University School of Medicine and colleagues recruited a healthy, asymptomatic individual lacking cardiac disease clinical history and carrying hypertrophic cardiomyopathy associated genetic variant in the sarcomeric gene, MYL3, which has been reported by ClinVar database to be likely pathogenic. Human-induced pluripotent stem cells or IPSCs were derived from the heterozygous carrier, and their genome was edited using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to generate karyo-specific IPSCs. Extensive essays, including measurements of gene expression, sarcomere structure, cell size, contractility, action potentials, and calcium handling were performed on the isogenic IPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, and together, the platform was shown to elucidate both benign and pathogenic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy-functional phenotypes. Thus, this paper demonstrates for the first time the unique potential of combining IPSC-based disease modeling and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology as a personalized risk assessment platform for determining the pathogenicity of a variant of unknown significance for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in a patient-specific manner. Transcatheter aortic valve replacement is increasingly being used for the treatment of severe aortic valve stenosis in patients at intermediate risk for surgical aortic valve replacement. The next paper provides real world data comparing indications and clinical outcomes of patients at intermediate surgical risk undergoing isolated transcatheter vs. surgical aortic valve replacement. Co-first and corresponding others, Dr Werner and Zahn from Clinical Ludwigshafen in Germany compared clinical characteristics and outcomes of more than 7,600 patients with intermediate surgical risk who underwent isolated transcatheter or conventional surgical aortic valve replacement within the prospective all-comers, German aortic valve registry between 2012 and 2014. Multi-variable analyses reveal that factors that were associated with performing transcatheter instead of surgical aortic valve replacement included advanced age, coronary artery disease, New York Heart Association class three or four, pulmonary hypertension, prior cardiac decompensation, and elective procedure, arterial occlusive disease, no diabetes mellitus, and a smaller aortic valve area. Unadjusted in-hospital mortality rates were equal for transcatheter and surgical aortic valve replacement, whereas unadjusted one-year mortality was significantly higher in patients with transcatheter aortic valve replacement. After propensity score matching, the difference in one-year mortality was no longer significant. Thus, this large registry analysis suggests that both transcatheter and surgical aortic valve replacement are reasonable treatment options in a real world population with aortic stenosis and intermediate surgical risk. The next paper demonstrates a key role of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 1 in hemorrhagic telangiectasia type 2. Now, this is an inherited genetic disorder where haplo-insufficiency of the activin receptor-like kinase 1 gene, ACVRL1, results in blood vessels that are prone to respond to angiogenic stimuli, leading to the development of telangiectatic lesions that can bleed. First author, Dr Thalgott, corresponding author, Dr Lebrin from Leiden University Medical Center and colleagues used ACVRL mutant mice and found that vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF receptor 1 levels were reduced, causing increased VEGF receptor 2 signaling that promoted sprouting angiogenesis, correcting the abnormal VEGF gradient, by expressing membranal-soluble VEGF receptor 1 in embryonic stem cells or blocking VEGF receptor 2 with antibodies in mutant mice, normalized the phenotype both in vitro and in vivo. Importantly, VEGF receptor 1 was reduced in the blood and skin blood vessels of patients with hemorrhagic telangiectasia type 2 compared with H match controls, demonstrating an important role of VEGF receptor 1 in these patients and explaining why their blood vessels might respond abnormally to angiogenic signals. These findings support the use of anti-VEGF therapy in hemorrhagic telangiectasia type 2. The next study suggests that hydroxychloroquine could be repurposed to reduce the risk of rheumatic heart disease following acute rheumatic fever. First author, Dr Kim, corresponding author, Dr Wicks from Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and University of Melbourne and their colleagues analyzed the immune response to group A streptococcus in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from an Australian Aboriginal acute rheumatic fever cohort by a combination of multiplex cytokine array, flow cytometric analysis, and global gene expression analysis by RNA sequencing. They then tested the widely used immunomodulatory drug, hydroxychloroquine for its effects on this response. They found that group A streptococcus activated persistent IL-1 beta production and selective expansion of a specific group of T helper 1 cells that produce GMCSF. Furthermore, hydroxychloroquine limited the expansion of these group A streptococcus-activated, GMCSF-producing T helper cells in vitro. Gene transcriptional profiling of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients with acute rheumatic fever showed dynamic changes at different stages of disease. Given the safety profile of hydroxychloroquine and its clinical pedigree in treating autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis where GMCSF plays a pivotal role, the authors therefore proposed that hydroxychloroquine could be repurposed to reduce the risk of rheumatic heart fever following acute rheumatic fever. The next paper identifies a new anchoring B genetic variant in unrelated Han Chinese probands with ventricular tachycardia. In this paper from co-first authors, Dr Zhu, Wang and Hu, co-corresponding authors, Dr Hong from Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University, Dr Mohler from Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and colleagues, the authors identified the first anchoring B variant, Q1283H, localized to the ZU5C region in a proband with recurrent ventricular tachycardia. Knocking mice with this variant showed an increased susceptibility to arrhythmias associated with abnormal calcium dynamics. The variant was associated with loss of protein phosphatase 2A activity, increased phosphorylation of ryanodine receptor, exaggerated delayed after depolarization-mediated trigger activity, and arrhythmogenesis. Furthermore, the administration of metoprolol or flecainide decreased the incidence of stress-induced ventricular arrhythmias, representing potential therapies for anchoring B variant-associated arrhythmias. Does variability in metabolic parameters affect health outcomes? First author, Dr Kim, corresponding author, Dr Lee from Seoul Saint Mary's Hospital College of Medicine and Catholic University of Korea and their colleagues used nationally representative data from the Korean National Health Insurance system, consisting of more than 6.7 million people who are free of diabetes, hypertension, or dyslipidemia and who underwent three or more health examinations from 2005 to 2012 and were followed to the end of 2015. Variability and fasting blood glucose and total cholesterol, systolic blood pressure and body mass index was measured using the coefficient of variation, standard of deviation, variability independent of the mean, and average real variability. They found that a high variability in fasting glucose and cholesterol, systolic blood pressure and body mass index was associated with a higher risk for all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction, and stroke. Variabilities in several metabolic parameters had additive associations with the risk of mortality and cardiovascular outcomes in the general population. These findings suggest that treatment strategies to reduce fluctuations in metabolic parameters may be considered another goal to prevent adverse health outcomes. How much exercise over a lifetime is necessary to preserve efficient ventricular arterial coupling? First author Dr Hieda, corresponding author Dr Levine from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and colleagues studied 102 seniors and grouped them based on their 25 years of exercise training history. The dynamic Starling mechanism was estimated by transfer function gain between beat-by-beat changes in diastolic pulmonary artery pressure and stroke volume index. They found that there was a graded dose-dependent improvement in ventricular arterial coupling with increasing amounts of lifelong regular exercise in healthy older individuals. Their data suggested that the optimal does of lifelong endurance exercise to preserve ventricular arterial coupling with age appeared to be at least four to five sessions per week. The sufficient lifelong endurance exercise was effective for maintaining the normal dynamic Starling mechanism, left ventricular compliance, and arterial compliance with aging, all of which may lead to favorable effect on cardiovascular stiffness or function. And that brings us to the end of our summaries this week. Now, for our feature discussion. Transcatheter aortic valve replacement is taking over the interventional world. It's really rapidly growing, and we're increasingly using it for the treatment of aortic stenosis. It was initially used for inoperable and high-risk patients but now is indicated even in the treatment of intermediate-risk patient, and even low-risk patients are being enrolled into current trials. So, with TAVR being used for low- and intermediate-risk patients, the longer-term results of this treatment involved your abilities becoming more and more important. Well, gratefully, we have today's feature paper, and it describes the five-year clinical outcomes and valve durability of the FRANCE-2 Registry. I'm so pleased to have with us the corresponding author, Dr Martine Gilard from University Hospital of Brest in France, we have our editorialist, Dr Anita Asgar from Montreal Heart Institute, and we have our associate editor, Dr Dharam Kumbhani from UT Southwestern. Martine, congratulations on this largest cohort of high-risk patients and long-term outcomes. Could you please tell us what you found? Dr Martine Gilard: Yes, and I'll just quote, actually, to have a follow-up of five years. We have 1,200 patients arrive at five years after rotation of TAVI. Each patient was a high-risk patient because it was at the beginning of each treatment, and in this time, it's only the high-risk patient was implanted with TAVI, and actually, we can follow this 1,200 patients, 50% of these patients of these patients have an echography because when we analyze these patients, we have an echography at five years, and the patients who have not echography at five years, the only difference is the age. It's very old patient. It's very difficult to make this echography on this patient to come back in our center, so it's why there is not all the patient who have an echography at five years. But our patients who have an echography, we can see that it's a very, very good result at five years. There is always the same area, just after before, of the valve. There is the same gradient. There is not a sign of deterioration. As you know, we have some guidelines published last year about how we asked to define deterioration of the valve, surgical or TAVI, and if we apply this new recommendation, we saw that in this largest cohort, at five years, there is only 13% of patient who have some sign of deterioration, and of these patients, we never need to make another valve in valve because the deterioration was not so important, and patient leave with this valve like that. There is no necessity to make a new valve in valve, so at five years of this very high-risk patient treated by TAVI, there is no necessity to implant a second valve because the valve deterioration. It's a very, very important message. Dr Carolyn Lam: Thank you, Martine. Indeed, an important message. And Anita, you wrote a beautiful editorial about it. First, could I ask you to frame the issue? I mean, is there any reason we would expect the durability to be any different from a surgical replacement? Dr Anita Asgar: I think that's a great question, Carolyn, and I congratulate again Martine and her team for doing a fantastic job to add some very important results to the clinical literature on TAVI. Five years is relatively early to see structural valve deterioration, so in a sense, it's not surprising, and we would consider this sort of medium-term follow-up rather than really long-term durability, but very reassuring that in a high-risk population of patients, that TAVR performs very well in this population of patients and as mentioned, is very low to the dynamic structural valve deterioration. One question I have for Martine is, as you mentioned, there was only about 12% that had some evidence of structural valve deterioration hemodynamically, but this didn't result in another procedure, and I wonder if you could explain a little bit about that, whether it's the hemodynamic dynamic value, and yet there's a clinical indication for re-intervention. How do you incorporate the two? Dr Martine Gilard: It's actually hemodynamic deterioration, there is some form of regurgitation. However, there is no need or clinical indication to make another intervention. So, if you compare this research to the bioprostheses surgical paths, the only one who have, at five years, no need to make a re-intervention appearing rotated, which is a valve, a surgical valve we have a longer bioprostheses surgical path. So, if we compare this best bioprostheses surgical valve, we have sustained results at five years. At five years, we have no need to make a re-intervention because the deterioration was not so important or as needed for clinical evidence as a need to make a new intervention. Dr Anita Asgar: So, there were some increased rates of heart failure in those patients with structural valve deterioration in your paper, and I know that in the paper you did mention that this is not an adjudicated outcome, and there wasn't a VARC definition for heart failure, but what's your interpretation of increasing heart failure events in these patients with structural valve deterioration? Dr Martine Gilard: We have no real definition about that. We know that there is another registry. We say that there is an increasing of heart failure, and during the follow-up, and the result of this heart failure increase in mortality. There is an increasing of heart failure, but the number of these patients, th…

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Circulation November 27, 2018 Nov 26, 2018

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on The Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and it's editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. We will be discussing accelerated diagnostic protocols for chest pain, a very, very important issue in Cardiology with very important new safety and effectiveness data on one such protocol provided in our feature paper this week. Coming right up after these summaries. Our first original paper this week identifies a new link between specific gut bacteria and atherosclerosis. Co-First authors, Dr Yoshida and Emoto, corresponding author, Dr Yamashita, from Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, and colleagues recruited patients with coronary artery disease and controls without coronary artery disease but with coronary risk factors. They then compared gut microbial composition using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing in fecal samples. Subsequently, they used atherosclerosis prone mice to study the mechanisms underlying the relationship between such species and atherosclerosis. Their analysis of gut microbial profile in patients with coronary artery disease showed a relative depletion of bacteroides vulgatus and bacteroides dorei compared to controls with coronary risk factors. Gavage with live bacteroides vulgatus and bacteroides dorei decreased fecal and plasma lipopolysaccharide levels and protected against atherosclerosis in apoE deficient mice. Fecal lipopolysaccharide levels in patients with coronary artery disease were significantly higher compared to controls. These findings suggest that bacteroides treatment may serve as a novel and effective therapeutic strategy for suppressing lipopolysaccharide-induced inflammatory response in coronary artery disease. The next paper identified a potential novel molecular target in the treatment of myocarditis. Co-First authors, Dr Chen and Zeng, Co-Corresponding authors, Dr Song from Fuwai Hospital in Beijing, and Dr Yang from Shenzhen University School of Medicine, and their colleagues aim to elucidate the role of BCL2 Like protein 12 in the pathogenesis of biased T Helper-2 response in myocarditis. Using a combination of mouse models of myocardial inflammation and human hearts from patients undergoing heart transplantation, the authors found that CD4 positive T-cells isolated from hearts in myocarditis at the end stage of heart failure expressed high levels of BCL2 Like protein 12, which was required for the development of aberrant T Helper 2 polarization in the heart. Thus, BCL2 Like protein 12 may be a novel target in the treatment of myocarditis, as well as other T Helper 2 biased inflammatory processes. Could vaccination against LDL be a way to prevent atherosclerosis? Well, the next paper brings us one step closer to this dream. First author, Dr Gisterå, corresponding author, Dr Hansson from Karolinska School University Hospital and colleagues developed T-cell receptor transgenic mice to study LDL autoimmunity in a humanized hypercholesterolemic mouse model of atherosclerosis. A strong T-cell dependent E-cell response was induced by ODL leading to production of anti-LDL IgG antibodies that enhanced LDL clearance and ameliorated atherosclerosis. Results show that anti-LDL immuno-reactivity evoked three atheroprotective mechanisms, namely 1) antibody-dependent LDL clearance, 2) increased cholesterol excretion, and 3) reduced vascular inflammation, thus targeting LDL-reactive T cells may enhance atheroprotective immunity, and vaccination against LDL components may be an attractive way to prevent atherosclerosis. MicroRNAs regulate nearly all biological pathways and dysregulation of MicroRNAs is known to lead to disease progression. However, are there cell type specific effects of MicroRNAs in the heart? Co-First authors, Drs Rogg and Abplanalp, corresponding author, Dr Dimmeler from Goethe University Frankfurt, and colleagues assessed MicroRNA target regulation using MicroRNA 92a3p as an example. Their data showed that MicroRNAs have cell type specific effects in vivo which would be overlooked in bulk RNA sequencing. Analysis of MicroRNA targets in cell subsets disclosed a novel function of MicroRNA 92a3p in endothelial cell autophagy and cardiomyocyte metabolism. These findings may have clinical applications for the fine tuning of autophagy and metabolism to mitigate tissue damage in patients with cardiac disease. The next paper establishes a mechanism by which cardiac inflammation may be initiated in response to hemodynamic stress, but in the absence of significant cardiomyocyte cell death. Co-First authors, Drs Suetomi and Willeford, Co-Corresponding authors, Drs Brown and Miyamoto from University of California San Diego, and their colleagues used conditional cardiomyocyte-specific calcium calmodulin-regulated kinase Delta all CaM kinase II Delta knockout mice to demonstrate that cardiomyocytes generate inflammatory chemokines and cytokines and are the initial site of NLRP3 inflammasome activation. They further identified a causal role for CaM-Kinase II Delta-mediated activation of NLRP3 inflammasome and inflammatory responses in macrophage recruitment, cardiac fibrosis, and development of heart failure induced by pressure overload. Their elegant mouse experiments revealed sites and mechanisms of proinflammatory gene and inflammasome activation within cardiomyocytes which could serve as targets for early intervention or disease prevention. Are there different metabolomic effects between PCSK9 inhibitors and statins? First author, Dr Sliz, Corresponding Author, Dr Würtz from Nightingale Health Limited in Helsinki, Finland, and their colleagues quantify 228 circulating metabolic measures by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy for over 5300 individuals in the PROSPER Trial at six months post randomization. The corresponding metabolic measures were also analyzed in eight population cohorts, including more than 72,000 individuals using a specific PCSK9 inhibitor SNP as an unfounded proxy to mimic the therapeutic effects of PCSK9 inhibitors. Scaled to an equivalent lowering of LDL cholesterol the effects of genetic inhibition of PCSK9 on these 228 metabolic markers were generally consistent with those of statin therapy. Alterations of lipoprotein lipid composition and fatty acid distributions were also similar. However, discrepancies were observed for very low-density lipoprotein or VLDL lipid measures where genetic inhibition of PCSK9 had weaker effects on lowering VLDL cholesterol compared with statin therapy. Genetic inhibition of PCSK9 showed no significant effects on amino acids, ketones, or a marker of inflammation, where a statin treatment weekly lowered this marker of inflammation. Thus, if VLDL lipids have an independent causal effect on cardiovascular disease risk, the observed discrepancy on VLDL lipid lowering could contribute to differences in cardiovascular risk reduction between statins and PCSK9 inhibitors for an equivalent reduction in LDL cholesterol. Moreover, these results exemplify the utility of large-scale metabolomic profiling with genetics and randomized trial data to uncover potential molecular differences between related therapeutics. The final original paper this week demonstrates a novel biomarker discovery paradigm to identify candidate biomarkers of cardiovascular and other diseases. Co-First authors, Dr Mosley and Benson, co-corresponding authors, Dr Wang from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Gerszten from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and their colleagues employed a virtual proteomic approach linking genetically-predicted protein levels to clinical diagnosis in more than 40,000 individuals. They used genome-wide association data from the Framingham Heart Study to construct genetic predictors for more than 1100 plasma protein levels. They validated the genetic predictors for 268 proteins and used them to compute predicted protein levels in more than 41,000 genotyped individuals in the eMerge Cohort. They tested associations for each predicted protein with more than 1100 clinical phenotypes. These associations were validated using directly-measured protein levels and either LDL cholesterol or subclinical atherosclerosis in the Malmo Diet and Cancer study. Using this virtual biomarker strategy the authors identified CLC1B and PDGFR Beta as potential circulating biomarkers of atherosclerosis and validated them in an epidemiologic cohort. Thus, these results demonstrate that a virtual biomarker study may efficiently identify potential biomarker disease associations, and that wraps it up for our summaries. Now for our feature discussion. Accelerated diagnostic protocols for testing are used everywhere. They're designed to improve the quality and value of chest pain risk stratification. However, many of them lack sufficient prospective safety and effectiveness data. We're so pleased to have a paper today that provides such important data on one of these accelerated diagnostic protocols for chest pain, and it's the HEART Pathway. To discuss this, I've got the corresponding author of today's featured paper, Dr Simon Mahler from Wake Forest School of Medicine, as well as our Associate Editor, Dr Deb Diercks from UT Southwestern. Simon, could you start by just telling us, what is the HEART Pathway? Dr Simon Mahler: Sure. Yeah, it's an accelerated diagnostic protocol. It's based on an accelerated diagnostic protocol called the HEART Score. We use a modified version of the Heart Score. We actually use a HEAR score, and that stands for the history, EKG, Age, and risk factors. That is combined with two troponin measures at 0 and 3 hours. We also factor in whether or not the patient has had prior coronary artery disease or has an acute ischemic EKG. So, to be low-risk you have to have a HEAR score of 0-3. HEAR is an acronym. You get points for each of those categories. If you have less than 3 points that's a low score. You have to have a low score, a non-ischemic EKG, no history of prior coronary disease, and two troponins less than a 99th percentile at 0 and 3 hours to be considered low risk and recommended for early discharge. If you don't meet any of those criteria then you are considered non-low risk and appropriate for further in-hospital evaluation. Dr Carolyn Lam: That's great. Could you just tell us what you did to give us some real-world safety and effectiveness data on this. Dr Simon Mahler: Yeah, so we had done a single-site randomized controlled trial. That was published in 2015 in Circulation: Quality and Outcomes, and really showed some promising results. We received some funding to do an implementation trial. So, this is the results of our implementation study. It's a before and after study. What we did was we sought to implement a HEART Pathway as a clinical decision support tool, integrated fully into our electronic medical record so that when providers see the patient with chest pain and order a troponin they interact with a HEART Pathway tool that guides them through the HEART Pathway risk assessment and then provides real-time decision support regarding their treatment and disposition decisions based on whether or not the patient has a low-risk assessment or a non-low-risk assessment. The design of the study was we collected data on all patients with chest pain and troponin order for one year while we worked on how we were gonna build this tool and embed it, and then we had three month watching period where we built the tool into the electronic health record across our three sites. Then, we had one year where we were post implementation where we collected data and looking at the difference in outcomes, particularly looking at both safety and utilization outcomes before and after use of the HEART Pathway. Dr Carolyn Lam: That's just such a clever design. Just give us a summary of the results before I ask Deb to chime in here. Dr Simon Mahler: There's a few really important things that we found. Probably the most important thing was the safety data that came out of this study. We had some good safety signals on prior studies. They didn't have enough sample size to really have a good precision around the safety point estimate, so in this study we had over 4000 patients in our post-implementation cohort, and about 31%, 30.7%, of those patients were classified as low-risk by the HEART Pathway. Among those patients that were classified by low-risk, the rate of death and MI, the composite outcome at 30 days, was 0.4%. Typically for these accelerated diagnostic protocols we want them to have an adverse cardiac event rate less than 1%, so a finding of 0.4% with a confidence in our role that doesn't extend beyond 1% that was a really important finding that really confirms the safety of this strategy. The other thing that we found which was interesting was that the use of the HEART Pathway was actually associated with detecting more myocardial infarctions during the index visit, which means that possibly the HEART Pathway use improved the recognition of those patients that were presenting with MIs. It's possible that without using the HEART Pathway some of those cases may have been missed. Finally, we were able to demonstrate that use of the HEART Pathway as a clinical decision support tool was able to decrease hospitalizations and some other utilization metrics such as stress testing and possible length of stay. Dr Carolyn Lam: Oh, that's awesome, Simon. I said it earlier. I'm gonna say it again. Thank you so much for publishing this wonderful work with Circulation. I really think that implementation, science, and decision support tools you've got that all in this paper, just beyond even the actual topic. Deb, take us behind the scenes a little bit with how we reacted as editors to this paper, please. Dr Deb Diercks: Well, I think that overall, we were really excited about this paper. It really does add a real, real context to something we were really discussing and wondering about. I think one of the great things about the implementation, and Simon, please comment on this, is the diversity of the places that you actually used this in. I mean, most of us when we look at papers there's always a fear that it won't be able to be generalized to real-world practices. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you really applied it to just a wide variety of Emergency Departments that really support that this could be used anywhere. Dr Simon Mahler: Yeah, I think that's a really important point, that we did this across our system so that included a large academic busy Emergency Department that sees over 100,000 patients per year, all the way, basically to a smaller 12,000 per year, essentially almost a free-standing Emergency Department at the time that we started our study; it now has inpatient bed capacity, and then a suburban/rural hospital, as well, with about 30,000 patient visits per year. We extended beyond kind of the typical kind of comfort zone of large academic centers and into smaller community Emergency Departments as well. Dr Deb Diercks: One of the things that this manuscript nicely articulated is that you kind of break it into the HEAR and then the troponin. Dr Simon Mahler: Right. Dr Deb Diercks: Things change in the US with troponin. How do you think that's gonna impact how you guys apply this Pathway in the future? Dr Simon Mahler: It's a big topic of discussion right now, what to do with these Pathways. Are these Pathways still needed with the availability now of high-sensitivity troponins in the United States? I think that for many years as we've kind of followed data coming out of Europe we've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of these tests in the U.S., and there's a lot we can learn from the European data so f…

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Circulation November 20, 2018 Issue Nov 19, 2018

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Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Is there a unique lipoprotein profile for incident peripheral artery disease as opposed to coronary or cerebral vascular disease? Well, you're just gonna have to wait for our feature discussion to find out. That's coming right up after these summaries. Our first original paper this week tells us that gene variance known to be associated with idiopathic and peripartum cardiomyopathy are also associated with preeclampsia. First and corresponding author Dr Gammill from University of Washington and colleagues studied 181 participants with confirmed preeclampsia from the Preeclampsia Registry in BioBank. Saliva samples were collected for DNA isolation and whole exome sequencing was performed to detect rare variants in 43 genes known to be associated with cardiomyopathy. Results were compared with data from two controlled groups, unrelated women with a gynecological disorder, sequence using the same methods and instruments, as well as published variant data from 33,000 subjects in the Exome Aggregation Consortium. The results showed that women who developed preeclampsia are more likely to carry protein altering mutations in genes associated with cardiomyopathy, particularly, the TTN gene which encodes the sarcomeric protein titin. Thus, detecting these gene variants may allow more specific diagnosis, classification, counseling and management of women at risk. Prior trials have shown that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDS confer cardiovascular risk. Now this has been postulated to be due to enhanced formation of methyl arginines in the kidney that would limit the action of nitric oxide throughout the vasculature. However, the next original paper in this week's journal suggests that this may not be correct. First author, Dr Ricciotti, corresponding author, Dr FitzGerald from University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and colleagues, used multiple genetic and pharmacological approaches to disrupt the COX 2 pathway in mice and analyze plasma from patients taking NSAIDS. However, they did not observe an increase in methyl arginines. In contrast, they did observe an increase in plasma asymmetric dimethylarginine or EDMA in mice-rendered hypertensive by infusion of angiotensin II at a dose that also caused renal impairment. After a four week washout period following the infusion of angiotensin II, blood pressure, creatinine, and ADMA levels all fell back to normal levels. Celecoxib-treated mice also exhibited increased ADMA and plasma creatinine in response to infusion of angiotensin II and their levels also returned to normal thereafter. Thus, it seems likely that the previous reported elevations in ADMA reflected renal dysfunction rather than a direct consequence of COX 2 deletion or inhibition. The authors end by suggesting that the most plausible mechanism by which NSAIDS confer a cardiovascular risk, is by suppression of COX 2 derived cardioprotective prostaglandins such as Prostacyclin rather than by enhanced formation of methyl arginines. The next original paper identifies new targets with the potential to prevent vascular malformations in patients with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia. Co-corresponding authors, Dr Ola and Eichmann from Yale University School of Medicine and colleagues looked at SMAD4, which is a downstream effector of transforming growth factor-beta/bone morphogenetic protein family ligands that signal via activin-like kinase receptors. The authors generated a tamoxifen inducible postnatal endo-fetal specific SMAD for a mutant mouse and showed that SMAD4 prevented flow-induced arterial venous malformations by inhibiting casein kinase II. The uncovered pathways provided novel targets for the treatment of vascular lesions in hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia related juvenile polyposis patients carrying SMAD4 mutations. The next original paper provides important data for the accurate diagnosis of long QT syndrome. Long QT syndrome can be a challenging diagnosis partly because the optimal method for QT assessment is not unequivocally established. QT experts advocate manual measurements with a tangent or threshold method. In today's paper, first and corresponding author, Dr Vink from Academic Medical Center University of Amsterdam and colleagues, aimed to assess similarities and differences between these two methods of QT interval analysis among 1,484 patients with a confirmed pathogenic variant in either KCNQ1, KCNH2 or SNC5A genes from 265 families. Both QT measurement methods yielded a high inter and intra reader validity and a high diagnostic accuracy. Using the same current guideline cutoff of QTC interval 480 milliseconds, both methods had similar specificity but yielded a different sensitivity. QTC interval cutoff values for the QT measured by the tangent method was lower compared to that measured by the threshold method. Plus, values were different depending on the correction for heart rate, age, and sex. The authors provided an adjusted cutoff values specified for method, correction formula, age, and sex. In addition, a freely accessible online probability calculator for long QT syndrome at www.QTcalculator.org has been made available as an aid in the interpretation of the QT interval. The next original paper demonstrates for the first time that thrombin mediated signaling may play a role in diet-induced atherogenesis. Co-first authors, Dr Raghavan and Singh, corresponding author Dr Rao from University of Tennessee Health Science Center and colleagues, used a mouse model of diet-induced atherosclerosis and molecular biological approaches and explored the role of thrombin and its G protein coupled receptor signaling in diet-induced atherosclerosis. They found that thrombin-induced CD36 expression and foam cell formation required protease activated receptor 1, G alpha 12, Pyk2, GAB 1, and protein kinase C theta dependent activating transcription factor 2 activation. Thus, inhibition of thrombin G protein coupled receptor signaling could be a promising target for the development of new drugs in reducing the risk of diet-induced atherogenesis. The next study provides insights into the long- term association of LDL cholesterol with coronary heart disease mortality in individuals at low tenure risks of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. First and corresponding author, Dr Abdullah, from VA North Texas Medical Center and UT Southwestern Medical Center and colleagues studied more than 36,000 subjects in the Cooper Clinic Longitudinal Study cohort who are at low tenure estimated risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. In other words, a low tenure risk of less than 7.5%. They've followed these patients for more than two decades. Results showed that LDL cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol at or above 160 milligrams per deciliter were independently associated with a 50 to 80% increased relative risk of cardiovascular disease mortality. The associations between LDL cholesterol and cardiovascular disease mortality were more robust when follow up was extended beyond the traditional 10 year estimated risk period. The associations remain significant in those with an estimated tenure atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk of less than 5%. These data suggests that LDL cholesterol levels at or above 160 milligrams per deciliter in individuals deemed to be at low tenure atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk are associated with worse long term cardiovascular disease mortality. These findings, along with other observational data and data extrapolated from clinical trials, support further consideration of appropriate LDL cholesterol thresholds for lipid lowering interventions in individuals categorized as low short-term risk. The final paper this week uncovers a novel therapeutic target for the prevention and treatment of thoracic aortic aneurysms. First author, Dr Nogi, corresponding author Dr Shimokawa from Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine and colleagues, used genetically modified mice to show a pathogenic role of the small GTP binding protein, GDP dissociation stimulator in the development of angiotensin 2 induced thoracic aortic aneurysms and dissection. Down regulation of this protein contributed to dysfunction of aortic smooth muscle cells and hence oxidative stress, and matrix metalloproteinase activities in the pathogenesis of thoracic aortic aneurysms and dissection. Local over expression of this small GTB binding protein GDP dissociation stimulator around the thoracic aorta inhibited aortic dilatation and rupture in deficient mice. And that wraps it up for this week's summaries. Now for our feature discussion. Atherosclerosis has been considered a systemic process, meaning that when we see a disease in one vascular bed, we assume that that's a risk marker for disease in other vascular territories, and that they share pathophysiology, they share risk factors. However, if we think about it, the prior studies have all been sort of focusing on coronary and cerebral vascular disease, but today's feature paper changes that a bit because it addresses a key knowledge gap in peripheral artery disease risk, and interestingly suggests that there may be a unique lipid profile that's related to peripheral artery disease. This is gonna be an exciting discussion and I have the first author, Dr Aaron Aday from Vanderbilt University Medical Center currently. We have our editorialist, Dr Parag Joshi from UT Southwestern, and our associate editor, Dr Anand Rohatgi from UT Southwestern. Welcome gentlemen and Aaron, could we start with you sharing about your study? Dr Aaron Aday: So, as you mentioned, a lot of the previous epidemiologic data on atherosclerosis have been primarily in coronary artery disease and stroke, and when we looked at peripheral artery disease or PAD, there seemed to be some subtle differences. So for instance, total cholesterol on HTL cholesterol seemed to be the strongest risk factors for future peripheral artery disease and in terms of LDL cholesterol, the data are somewhat mixed. Some have found a weak association, some have actually found no association. And so building on that, we wanted to see if using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, we could elucidate more details about the litho protein pathways associated with peripheral artery disease. And we did this in the women's health study which is a prospective cohort study of women free of cardiovascular disease, the baseline, they were aged 45 and older. And what we've found in terms of the standards with their profiles, we again found that there was no association between LDL cholesterol and future peripheral artery disease, whereas certain standard lipid measures like HDL cholesterol were strongly associated with PAD, and then using the Endemol spectroscopy tool, we found that actually, small LDL particles and total LDL particles were concentrations of both of those markers, were strong risk factors for future PAD and other measures like total HDL particle concentration were even more strongly associated with future PAD than coronary artery disease. So essentially the signature associated with future peripheral artery disease, had some important differences than that for a composite of coronary artery disease and stroke. Dr Carolyn Lam: Aaron thanks for that. That's beautifully described and just so intriguing. Parag, could you tell us how should we be thinking about results like this? Dr Parag Joshi: It's a great paper and it really highlights a new and unique approach in that we ... Peripheral artery disease as an isolated incident event is fairly understudied I guess we could say and so, this is a really nice paper to start choosing out some of the risk factors for that. I think overall, when we think of peripheral arterial disease in general, I think historically, we've thought of it as similar pathophysiology, you know LDL particles and perhaps other particles depositing in the arterial space. But this does highlight some important differences that might exist and I think one of those seems to be that maybe this is more a signature of elevated remnant lipoproteins or triglyceride rich remnant lipoproteins, small dent LDL particles, low HDL, that sort of metabolic syndrome type patterns that we look at as a high risk factor that may be more contributory to peripheral artery disease than coronary disease, or at least more specific to peripheral artery disease. I guess one of my main questions about that from your work Aaron is, how can we be sure this isn't just a pre-clinical marker of diabetic patients which we know have this type of pattern? Dr Aaron Aday: Sure, it's certainly a possibility. I think what's notable in the cohort, at least a time enrollment. And there was a very little diabetes and actually there was a much greater prevalent of metabolic syndrome. So in my mind, it may be more of a metabolic syndrome specific marker rather than necessarily down the diabetes pathway, but it's certainly something that needs to be explored further. Dr Parag Joshi: I wonder whether women's health studies such a healthy cohort that I wonder if this is picking up some signal before the answer to diabetes or as you said, metabolic syndrome, you know which certainly suggests an insulin resistance pattern and we know the association of diabetes with peripheral artery disease is stronger and so I wonder if this may be a sort of earlier way of picking that up. Dr Aaron Aday: It may be. I think one thing to notice is the outcome of peripheral artery disease that we're using. So it is symptomatic disease. So, we're not picking up a lot of ulcers that are developing in the future, it's more the claudication and then people who've undergone revascularization. Certainly diabetics have both of those as well but I think that may suggest it's not fully unexplained by developing diabetes than peripheral artery disease further down the line. Dr Parag Joshi: Yeah that's a great point. Dr Carolyn Lam: Yeah great questions, great thoughts. Anand, what about you? Did you have questions too? Dr Anand Rohatgi: I think from my perspective and thinking about it for circulation and its readership, we found this really interesting for several reasons. Number one, I think is, as you all have discussed, peripheral arterial disease just is not as well characterized and you can see that here in over 25,000 people, add about a 100 a bed, so I think in younger folk, it takes a lot of people to study, to be able to really understand kind of the pathophysiology of peripheral arterial disease. The other thing that they think they really shed some light on is how this is happening in women in particular and in women, of course as we know have been understudied in all cardiovascular diseases, but in particular, diseases like this which are less common. It's really insightful to see that these lipid abnormalities in women are contributing to peripheral arterial disease more so than your typical LDL cholesterol management and interestingly enough, most of the women who had PAD events in this study, did not have other cardiovascular events. They really just had PAD events exclusively and I thought that was really intriguing, and the use of this advanced lipoprotein testing, this NMR modality has been very useful in terms of biology and research, and I think that's the case here where we really go under the hood Carolyn, as you said, and get kind of deep dive, the lipid metalobles on abnormalities. And I think Parag and Aaron hit the nail in the head that this is really capturing an insulin resistance of phenotype and what I really…

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