This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Robert A. Harrington, MD: This is Bob Harrington from Stanford University, back for part 2 of the 2022 year in cardiology review. I'm here with my good friend and colleague, Dr Mike Gibson, from Boston. Mike is an interventional cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess. He's a professor of medicine at Harvard, and he's the CEO of the not-for-profit Baim Institute, an academic research institute.
Mike, in the first part, we were talking about doing clinical trials in China and being able to answer questions more rapidly. In this session, I'd like to run through a whole bunch of individual trials, agents, big questions, with the underlying theme of "Can we do things better?"
One of my favorite trials of the year tested a thing that I learned about by listening to people like Jim Januzzi and Gregg Fonarow, which is this notion of rapid escalation of guideline-directed medical therapy for heart failure. We were all taught to start your beta-blocker, add your MRA, add your ARB or ACE inhibitor, etc., which takes months and months. Now, there's a randomized trial that says people do better if you start it all at once.
