Pulmonary hypertension due to left heart disease An important sign of advanced heart failure Pulmonary hypertension is usually a sign of more advanced stage of left heart disease (PH-LHD). The central characteristic of PH-LHD is an elevated pulmonary arterial wedge pressure of >15 mmHg.…
View Post 6 min This content is machine translated Pulmonary arterial hypertension New drugs reduce morbidity and mortality Treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) includes nonspecific measures (basic therapy) and specific drugs (selective pulmonary vasodilators). An extended basic therapy, including oral anticoagulation, rhythm control, rehabilitation measures and psychosocial…
View Post 6 min This content is machine translated "Therapy-resistant" hypertension What are the reasons? The definition of refractory hypertension is very precise (tab. 1): Blood pressure in the physician’s office is >140/90 mmHg despite triple combination therapy in appropriate dosage (including a diuretic). In the case…
View Post 9 min This content is machine translated Hypertension in the elderly Does lowering blood pressure provide any benefit at all, and how low should you go? With increasing age, systolic blood pressure rises continuously, whereas diastolic blood pressure rises until the sixth decade of life and then falls again. Thus, in old age, isolated systolic hypertension…
View Post 6 min This content is machine translated Statin therapy Lipid lowering in old age – does it make sense? The benefits of statin therapy in secondary prevention should not be denied in principle to older patients at risk. Currently, statins have no value in primary prophylaxis in old age.…
View Post 7 min This content is machine translated Severe aortic valve stenosis with concomitant mitral regurgitation Does the mitral valve have to be treated as well? Accurate diagnosis lays the foundation in the presence of double valve pathology aortic valve stenosis / mitral valve stenosis. Since the two pathologies influence each other, a multimodality approach including…
View Post 6 min This content is machine translated Update Refresher Internal Medicine “Fat kills” – or is it? At the Update Refresher Internal Medicine, the two cardiologists from the Stadtspital Triemli Prof. Dr. med. Franz Eberli and PD Dr. med. David Kurz discussed news and views from current…
View Post 8 min This content is machine translated Acute pulmonary embolism The role of surgery Pulmonary embolectomy has become an important therapeutic option in patients with acute massive pulmonary embolism with present signs of right ventricular strain when the indication is carefully and interdisciplinary (cardiac…
View Post 9 min This content is machine translated AHA Congress 2015 in Orlando Big News: Do we need to rethink blood pressure targets? The dominant topic at the AHA Congress was the SPRINT trial and its implications for future hypertension treatment. Is it prognostically meaningful to target lower systolic blood pressure values in…
View Post 8 min This content is machine translated Aortic valve replacement Risk stratification and effective surgery outcomes. Patients with biologic valve replacements have a higher likelihood of reoperation but a smaller likelihood of major bleeding compared with patients with mechanical aortic valve prostheses. Current studies show no…
View Post 9 min This content is machine translated Modern concept of coronary surgery Improving the gold standard Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) with heart-lung machine is the gold standard of myocardial revascularization. The results of off-pump surgery and percutaneous intervention (PCI) should be measured against this. Bypass…