Good Writers Need to be Good Listeners, Too

Good Writers Need to be Good Listeners, Too

LCZ696: too good to be true?

This issue of the European Heart Journal contains a major statement by the PARADIGM-HF Investigators, who present an ‘putative placebo’ analysis for LCZ696, a new medicine that yielded a remarkable reduction in total mortality and heart failure events in patients with significant heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HF-REF). (NB: I serve as a consultant on Novartis’s cardiovascular–met...

How Good Does It Need to Be?

H igh-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) assays reportedly allow early definitive triage of patients with possible acute myocardial infarction (AMI). To be confident that one can implement such strategies safely, fastidious data are required. In their paper in this issue of the Journal, Mokhtari et al. (1) build on the protocol included in the European Society of Cardiology guidelines to rul...

Functional MRI lie detection: too good to be true?

Neuroscientists are now applying a 21st-century tool to an age-old question: how can you tell when someone is lying? Relying on recently published research, two start-up companies have proposed to use a sophisticated brain-imaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to detect deception. The new approach promises significantly greater accuracy than the conventional polygraph...

Novel oral anticoagulants: too good to be true?

It is fair to say that the pharmacological therapy of cardiovascular disease has not been an area of spectacular growth in recent years. Little has happened in the treatment of hypertension and heart failure. There has been interest in the development of antiplatelet drugs in acute coronary syndromes and percutaneous interventions, but not in long-term cardiovascular prevention to compete with ...