The utility and safety of β-blockers in pulmonary hypertension is controversial. Anecdotal reports suggest that β-blockers may be harmful in these patients. The aim of our study was to evaluate outcomes of β-blocker use in pulmonary hypertension.We reviewed patients from our pulmonary hypertension registry between 2000 and 2011. Patients who continued to use β-blockers were compared to those wh...

Antihypertensive Treatment and Left Ventricular Mass Reduction: The Importance of Choosing the Comparator To the Editor: The meta-analysis by Fagard et al1 on the effects of various antihypertensive drug classes on left ventricular mass is based on the pairwise comparisons of the original studies and avoids the problems with previous meta-analyses, which considered each treatment arm of the dif...

BACKGROUND The mainstay of therapy for catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) is maximal doses of beta-blockers. However, although beta-blockers prevent exercise-induced ventricular tachycardia (VT), most patients continue to have ventricular ectopy during exercise, and some studies report high mortality rates despite beta-blockade. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study wa...

A single ‘odd’ interaction can cause two user interaction sessions to diverge in similarity, and stand in the way of generalization. The sensitivity of session-based recommenders to session similarity motivates us to explicitly identify and remove such ‘similarity blockers’. Specifically, we leverage huge amounts of data, which allow us to identify blockers in the form of non-co-occurring items...

With numerous safe and effective antihypertensive drugs now available, the clinician should no longer choose only diuretic agents or beta-adrenergic receptor blockers (beta-blockers) as initial therapy. Five classes of agents, including angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, beta-blockers, calcium entry blockers, peripheral alpha 1-adrenergic receptor blockers, and thiazide diuretic agents, ...