Cath Lab Recap: India's Stent $ Transparency; Renal Denervation for Stroke?

India's drug price regulators started asking hospitals and cardiac centers to make public the price that they charge patients for coronary stents, The Financial Express reported. The price tag and manufacturer's details for each stent are to be available on each center's website.

A rat study suggested renal denervation performed during the acute phase of ischemic stroke may improve outcomes. (Stroke)

The FDA gave the nod to the sensor-enabled FlexAbility Ablation Catheter from Abbott for treating atrial flutter, according to Cardiovascular Business. This is the second sensor-enabled catheter to be approved for use with the EnSite Precision cardiac mapping system.

Another recent winner of FDA approval: the Cobra PzF coronary stent from CeloNova. Its thin polymer coating is said to work well for patients at high risk of bleeding. (MedPage Today)

Stent retriever therapy for acute ischemic strokes stemming from large vessel occlusions was effective in the real world, according to the STRATIS registry study presented at the International Stroke Conference. "This study shows that in real-world practice with sicker patients and in a wider range of hospitals, thrombectomy with the Solitaire stent retriever is performing as well as or better than in the randomized clinical trials, and that's very good news for this highly effective therapy," the author said. (Healio)

To weigh the benefits and harms of prolonged dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT), researchers created predictive models of cardiovascular events and bleeding (c-statistics of 0.75 and 0.72, respectively). Prolonged DAPT could benefit 63% to 99% of patients depending on how the models were weighted, the team reported in European Heart Journal.

Renal interventions fell from 18% of peripheral arterial interventions to 5.6% from 2006 to 2013, while femoral-popliteal procedures increased from 54.9% to 64.5%, according to a large registry. Patients presenting with critical limb ischemia rose substantially during the same time, as did the rates of balloon angioplasty and cutting/scoring balloon usage. (Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions)

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