Cardio Round-up: Don't Skip Breakfast, A New Aortic Valve Approval, and More

This week’s edition of the Cardio Round-up includes a warning about skipping breakfast, an FDA approval on the transcatheter aortic valve front, new light on the use of antibiotics in older women, a look at the genomics of oncology-drug-induced cardiotoxicity, and a primer on stent placement.

Older women who take antibiotics over the long term have an increased risk for suffering a heart attack, as well as stroke, according to a study in the European Heart Journal. The study included 36,429 women from the Nurses’ Health Study free of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Women who used antibiotics in late adulthood were at a significantly higher risk for CVD (HR=1.32; 95% CI, 1.03 to 1.70) compared to those who did not use antibiotics later in life. The researchers posited that it could have something to do with the manner in which antibiotics disrupt the micro-environment in which gut bacteria live.

The FDA has approved the Lotus Edge transcatheter aortic valve for use in patients with severe aortic stenosis. DocWire News took the occasion to put the new valve into context with its fellow transcatheter aortic valves (SAPIEN and CoreValve) that are also FDA-approved for use in transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedures treating patients with severe aortic stenosis in need of valve replacement.

Skipping breakfast was associated with an increase in the risk for cardiovascular death in prospective cohort study published recently in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The sample included over 6,500 individuals. The results suggested that never consuming breakfast had an increased risk for cardiovasculaar mortality and all-cause mortality when compared to those who consumed breakfast every day. The study elicited some mixed reactions on social media.

A new study looked at the potential genetic predisposition to oncology-drug-induced cardiotoxicity. Using updated information from genome-wide association studies and data on the use of pluripotent stem cells, and even modern gene-editing techniques like CRISPR, the researchers wrote that it was “critical” to treat the “common and growing concern” of chemotherapy-induced cardiac adverse events through “careful phenotypic characterization, identification of genomic variants that contribute to gene function and expression, and genomic editing to verify mechanistic pathways, [using] hiPSC technology.”

CARDIOLOGY BLOG: What Is Stent Placement? – If you’ve ever wondered what a stent is, how it works, and how it could impact you or potentially somebody you love at some point in the future, read this DocWire News primer.