(11/10/2018)

The American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions were recently held November 10–12 in Chicago, IL. The AHA yearly sessions provide the most up-to-date research and a new dimension of cardiovascular discovery and clinical practice for clinicians, basic scientists, and researchers. Over 12,600 professional attendees including physicians, cardiology professionals, research scientists and other non-healthcare professionals from more than 100 countries attended and presented at this year's sessions.

Highlighted at this year's sessions were recently released studies published in two major medical journals, diving into the conduit practices of the Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CABG) procedure.  These most recent publications address the long debated influence of the vein-graft harvesting technique for conduit harvested for CABG patients, conducted using a very important model, as described as using only expert endoscopic vein-graft harvesters.  The long-term clinical outcomes was shown to have a lower rate of wound complications in the endoscopic-harvest group than in the open-harvest group (NEJM Nov 2018). Further studies supporting CABG procedures was presented in patients with diabetes who received coronary revascularization with CABG revealed this leads to lower all-cause mortality than with PCI-DES (stents) in long-term follow-up (JACC Nov 2018).  

These studies highlighted our practice standards and revealed Stanford is at the forefront of expert level care. Patients' chances of successfully recovering from cardiac intervention are higher, with less complication rates, at an expert EVH center such as Stanford. The Stanford cardiac program includes all expert level advanced practice provider conduit harvesters, fully trained and specialized in the operating room and procedures. Furthermore, an additional conduit used for CABG surgery, the Radial artery conduit, has been more recently published for preferred use as conduit in CABG surgery (Circulation, April 2018). Stanford again has expert level advanced practice provider conduit harvesters for endoscopic radial artery harvesting, further providing our patients with world class healthcare at Stanford.