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Urban or rural: Ensuring access to quality vascular care ‘no matter what’
Michael Dalsing, MD, talks to Vascular Specialist about how his formative years growing up in rural Wisconsin, as well as experience of operating in inner-city Indianapolis, helped inform the topic he chose for this year’s Crawford Critical Issues Forum set…
Cancer patients face greater risks from AAA repair
Elective abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair in patients with a cancer diagnosis is associated with several poor postoperative outcomes, according to a newly published study from researchers at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. “Due to the strong association between AAA and cancer,…
Less frequent post-EVAR surveillance might be safe in some patient groups, study suggests
Results from the multicenter, retrospective ODYSSEUS study carried out in The Netherlands suggest that less frequent surveillance after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) may be warranted. However, authors Anna C. M. Geraedts, MD, of Amsterdam University Medical Centres, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,…
Supply & demand: [Private] practice matters
Vascular surgeons in private practice could play a crucial role in alleviating one of the existential problems currently vexing the specialty: The training of future generations of specialists and its intersection with declining numbers of open abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA)…
Interview: SCVS leaders discuss training challenges, position of private practice, diversifying generation of surgeons
Barriers thrown up between the worlds of private or community vascular surgery and academic practice need to be dismantled for the betterment of the specialty at large. At stake are some of the very fundamentals of what makes vascular surgeons…
FDA advisory panel issues recommendations on lifelong surveillance for EVAR
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced it has issued a letter to healthcare providers emphasizing the importance of lifelong surveillance, including imaging, for patients with abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR). “Regular imaging surveillance, within 30-days…
Sex discordance and postoperative outcomes: We should be vigilant of a real disparity in health outcomes
The recent JAMA Surgery publication “Association of surgeon-patient sex concordance with postoperative outcomes” is a population-based, retrospective cohort study of more than 1 million patients that concluded “sex discordance between surgeons and patients negatively affected outcomes following common procedures.”1 Furthermore,…
Study ‘supports’ SVS open AAA volume recommendations
A multicenter, retrospective database analysis suggests improved open abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) outcomes when surgeon volume is greater than seven cases yearly and performed in hospitals with a 30-day mortality rate less than 5%. “Open AAA repair has decreased in frequency…
Complex TAAA: US ARC IDE registry reports better survival vs. real-world data after endovascular repair
Patients treated in Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved investigational device exemption (IDE) trials for complex thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms (TAAAs) in the U.S. Aortic Research Consortium (ARC) had better 30-day and one-year survival compared with those recorded in the real-world Vascular…
Interview: Combating the problem of spin, or overinterpretation, in RCTs
The presence of spin, or overinterpretation, in scientific papers that ultimately demonstrate statistically insignificant findings had been gnawing away at Thomas Forbes, MD, for quite some time. The practice, the University of Toronto vascular chair reflects, is by no means…