Live Webcast: From Saint Joseph's Hospital and Marshfield Clinic: May 16, 2007 at 4:00 PM CDT

On Wednesday, May 16, at 4 p.m. CDT, an Internet audience will have a rare chance to watch a heart care procedure as it happens. During a live webcast on www.OR-Live.com from Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Marshfield, Wisconsin, Marshfield Clinic interventional cardiologists will perform a live cardiac catheterization procedure as well as a possible angioplasty and stent placement. A physician moderator will be on hand to walk the audience through the procedure and give them the inside scoop on the crucial decisions the heart care team is making as they happen.

Juan Mesa, MD; Kamilla Buddemeier, MD; Milind Shah, MD; and Sherief Rezkalla, MD, all Marshfield Clinic interventional cardiologists on staff at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Marshfield, will participate in this live webcast.

During a cardiac catheterization, a physician inserts a thin flexible tube called a catheter into an artery or vein in the arm or leg, and then advances the catheter into the chambers of the heart or coronary arteries. In order to view blockages in the arteries, physicians will inject a dye through the catheter and if a blockage is detected, a balloon can be inflated (angioplasty), which compresses the plaque against the artery wall and opens it. Additionally a stent, or wire mesh tube, can be deployed to hold the artery open.

According to the American Heart Association, one in three American adults have at least one type of cardiovascular disease. In 2004, approximately 1.3 million cardiac catheterizations and an estimated 664,000 percutaneous coronary interventions (angioplasties and stents) were performed in the United States.

Visit http://www.or-live.com/StJoseph/1600 now to learn more and view a program preview.

New Hope For Cardiac Victims

Heart attack victims in Ottawa, Canada now have a new protocol which vastly improves their outcome. The program founded by the University of Ottawa in May of 2005 has been credited with reducing the heart attack death rate of high risk patients by 75%.

In the past when a 911 caller complained of chest pains or shortness of breath an ambulance would be dispatched to transport the patient to the nearest emergency room. Under the new protocol high risk patients are now transported to the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. Paramedics have been trained to recognize a certain category of heart attack — ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction, or STEMI — and will transport high-risk patients directly to the institute.

In the past patients would be go through the triage process before any treatment. Paramedics would transmit readings from an electrocardiogram to emergency rooms and wait for an interpretation. Now that paramedics have been trained to interpret the the tracings, patients exhibiting signs of STEMI are taken to the Heart Institute. These patients are routinely given clog busting drugs with a 50% success rate. Patients transported to the Heart Institute receive angioplasty to open blocked arteries. This procedure has a 90% success rate.

New Therapies To Treat Coronary Disease

Thomas J. Stegmann, MD, co-founder, co-president and chief medical officer of CardioVascular BioTherapeutics, Inc. will give an overview of possible new medical therapies to treat coronary heart disease at the 4th annual World Health Care Congress to be held April 22-24 at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.  CardioVascular BioTherapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing formulations of its active pharmaceutical ingredient Fibroblast Growth Factor-1(141)(FGF-1(141)), to treat
a number of diseases characterized by inadequate blood flow to a tissue or organ. FGF-1 is delivered via direct injection into the heart muscle.

Cardiovascular Disease Due To Diabetes On The Rise

Rates of cardiovascular disease resulting from diabetes has been increasing over the past 50 years. Researchers compared risk factors for cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular “events” such as heart attacks in Framingham study participants from two different time periods. The first group was examined between 1952 and 1974 and the more recent group was
examined between 1975 and 1998. A total of 9,540 individuals age 45 to 64 were evaluated. The risk attributable to diabetes was 5.2 percent in the earlier time period, compared to 7.8 percent in the later period. Most of the increased risk was observed among men.

These findings emphasize the need for increased efforts to prevent diabetes and to aggressively treat and control risk factors among those with diabetes.

Lead author of the study, Caroline Fox, M.D., is associated with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.