Cardiac arrest systems of care are successfully coordinating community, emergency medical services, and hospital efforts to improve the process of care for patients who have had a cardiac arrest. As a result, the number of people surviving sudden cardiac arrest is increasing. However, physical, cognitive, and emotional effects of surviving cardiac arrest may linger for months or years. Systematic recommendations stop short of addressing partnerships needed to care for patients and caregivers after medical stabilization. This document expands the cardiac arrest resuscitation system of care to include patients, caregivers, and rehabilitative healthcare partnerships, which are central to cardiac arrest survivorship.

The adult mammalian heart has limited regenerative capacity, mostly attributable to postnatal cardiomyocyte cell cycle arrest. In the last 2 decades, numerous studies have explored cardiomyocyte cell cycle regulatory mechanisms to enhance myocardial regeneration after myocardial infarction. Pkm2 (Pyruvate kinase muscle isoenzyme 2) is an isoenzyme of the glycolytic enzyme pyruvate kinase. The role of Pkm2 in cardiomyocyte proliferation, heart development, and cardiac regeneration is unknown.

In patients with transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, tafamidis reduces all-cause mortality and cardiovascular hospitalizations and slows decline in quality of life compared with placebo. In May 2019, tafamidis received expedited approval from the US Food and Drug Administration as a breakthrough drug for a rare disease. However, at $225 000 per year, it is the most expensive cardiovascular drug ever launched in the United States, and its long-term cost-effectiveness and budget impact are uncertain. We therefore aimed to estimate the cost-effectiveness of tafamidis and its potential effect on US health care spending.

Myocardial perfusion reflects the macro- and microvascular coronary circulation. Recent quantitation developments using cardiovascular magnetic resonance perfusion permit automated measurement clinically. We explored the prognostic significance of stress myocardial blood flow (MBF) and myocardial perfusion reserve (MPR, the ratio of stress to rest MBF).

Understanding and addressing the unique health needs of people residing in rural America is critical to the American Heart Association's pursuit of a world with longer, healthier lives. Improving the health of rural populations is consistent with the American Heart Association's commitment to health equity and its focus on social determinants of health to reduce and ideally to eliminate health disparities. This presidential advisory serves as a call to action for the American Heart Association and other stakeholders to make rural populations a priority in programming, research, and policy. This advisory first summarizes existing data on rural populations, communities, and health outcomes; explores 3 major groups of factors underlying urban-rural disparities in health outcomes, including individual factors, social determinants of health, and health delivery system factors; and then proposes a set of solutions spanning health system innovation, policy, and research aimed at improving rural health.

It is difficult to noninvasively phenotype atrial fibrillation (AF) in a way that reflects clinical end points such as response to therapy. We set out to map electrical patterns of disorganization and regions of reentrant activity in AF from the body surface using electrocardiographic imaging, calibrated to panoramic intracardiac recordings and referenced to AF termination by ablation.

Ablation is a widely used therapy for atrial fibrillation (AF); however, arrhythmia recurrence and repeat procedures are common. Studies examining surrogate markers of genetic susceptibility to AF, such as family history and individual AF susceptibility alleles, suggest these may be associated with recurrence outcomes. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to test the association between AF genetic susceptibility and recurrence after ablation using a comprehensive polygenic risk score for AF.

Catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF) using point-by-point radiofrequency energy or single-application one-shot balloons is either technically challenging or have limited ability to accommodate variable patient anatomy to achieve acute and durable pulmonary vein (PV) isolation. A novel ablation system employs low intensity collimated ultrasound (LICU)-guided anatomic mapping and robotic ablation to isolate PVs. In this first-in-human, single-center, multioperator trial, VALUE trial (VytronUS Ablation System for Treatment of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation; NCT03639597) in patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, this LICU system was evaluated to determine its safety, effectiveness in PV isolation, and freedom from recurrent atrial arrhythmias.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) may occur after an acute precipitant and subsequently resolve. Management guidelines for AF in these settings are unclear as the risk of recurrent AF and related morbidity is poorly understood. We examined the relations between acute precipitants of AF and long-term recurrence of AF in a clinical setting.

Patients with vascular stiffening may display increased arterial afterload that is out of proportion to systolic blood pressure (SBP). Since vascular and endothelial dysfunction develop in patients with coarctation of aorta (COA), we hypothesized that for any SBP, patients with mild COA (COA peak velocity <2 m/s) will have a higher arterial afterload and increased left ventricular mass index (LVMI) compared with controls, and that Doppler-derived arterial load indices would be a better predictor of LVMI compared with SBP alone.

Measurement of myocardial blood flow (MBF) with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is feasible using cardiac cameras with solid-state detectors. SPECT MBF has been shown to be accurate when compared with positron emission tomography MBF measured in the same patients. However, the value of a test result applied to an individual patient depends strongly on the precision or repeatability of the test. The purpose of our study is to measure the precision of SPECT MBF measurements using 99mTc-tetrofosmin and a solid-state cardiac camera.

The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Appropriate Use Criteria were designed to aid clinical decision-making, yet their association with health status outcomes after chronic total occlusion percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is unknown.