Intensive sessions, innovative research promised from ACC.16

With a team on the ground in Chicago, Healio.com/Cardiology will bring live coverage of the top research being presented at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Session.

The 3-day conference, starting Saturday, will focus on population health and feature intensive sessions, as well as more interactive poster sessions in which attendees can speak directly to the researchers.

This year, attendees can look forward to a more innovative educational format with more of an emphasis on learning and less on lecturing, Kim Allan Williams Sr., MD, FACC, American College of Cardiology president and Cardiology Today Editorial Board member, said during a media pre-briefing.

Kim Allan Williams Sr.

Focus on population health

“Throughout my presidency, we have had a focus at ACC on population health. It is one of our strategic mission statements,” Williams said. “We have been actualizing that mission by having population health meetings, innovations, and within population health we are actually talking about lifestyle, and that is all coming together in ACC.16.”

He said one highlight of ACC.16 will be the Simon Dack Lecture presented during the opening showcase session. David B. Nash, MD, MBA, dean of the population health department at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, will give a talk, titled “Population Health: Is it the Secret Sauce?”

Williams said during the pre-briefing that Nash will help “guide us into our next few decades of how we can actually impact populations in a better manner, reducing risk factors,” as well as complications, and preventing diseases themselves.

Half-day intensives

Williams also touted a half-day intensive session, “Lifestyle Medicine: A Little Less Drug, a Little More Sex, and a Lot More Rock and Roll,” which will offer strategies on diet, exercise and smoking cessation, as well as discuss the role love plays in CV health.

“People will come for the catchy title, but stay for the science of everything, from nutrition to lifestyle habits that can reduce CV events,” Williams said.

Another noteworthy keynote lecture is the Eugene Braunwald Lecture on Future Directions in Cardiovascular Medicine on “Evidence and the Practice of CV Medicine” by Robert M. Califf, MD, MACC, FDA commissioner.

Latest in clinical research

For ACC.16, more than 5,144 abstracts were submitted and 2,403 accepted for oral presentations. There will be 24 late-breaking clinical trials featured in five sessions, with 10 late-breaking trials accepted as featured clinical research.

“We are looking forward to the simultaneous publication of many of these critically informative trials along with our session,” Williams said.

Athena Poppas, MD, FACC, ACC Annual Scientific Session chair, said findings from the HOPE-3 trial, which will be presented in the opening showcase, could have great implications. Poppas called it a “very important trial ... with a population that hadn’t really been studied well before in such a large and long-term study.”

Athena Poppas

She said HOPE-3 is similar to the SPRINT trial, but with a larger population and longer follow-up. HOPE-3 has two main interventions, BP-lowering and lipid-lowering agents. The researchers evaluated what their combined effect would be on reducing CVD in patients without known heart disease and at average risk, and then looked at the two interventions separately to see whether one is more effective than the other.

Nearly half of the study population is women, which is “interesting” and “unusual,” Poppas said. “And importantly, the majority of the population should be of non-European descent,” making this “very novel, very impactful and may change the way we do business.”

She said another anticipated late-breaking trial is on resuscitation outcomes in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, in which different algorithms of medical interventions were compared with standard resuscitation. The endpoint was survival to discharge.

“Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is an ongoing global problem, particularly in the United States,” Poppas said. “Emergency medical technicians arrive early, but the exact algorithms of medical interventions used has not been well studied, so this is the first randomly allocated study, and it will utilize paramedics.”

In another late-breaker, researchers from the INOVATE-HF trial will discuss the effect of vagal nerve stimulation in HF. More than 700 patients from more than 80 sites were enrolled in this trial.

“Parasympathetic nerve modulation is an emerging therapy for HF, so this is a pilot study looking at safety and efficacy in patients that have class III HF,” Poppas said.

Presentations of interest

The IMPEDANCE-HF trial looked at lung impedance as a guide to treatment to reduce hospitalization for patients with HF, Poppas said. Two hundred patients were randomly assigned a noninvasive lung impedance monitoring group or a control group.

Important findings could also emerge from ACCELERATE, which analyzed the effect of HDL-raising therapies; the GAUSS-3 trial, which compared the PCSK9 inhibitor evolocumab (Repatha, Amgen) with ezetimibe (Zetia, Merck) in patients who are statin-intolerant; and the Stepathlon CV Health Study, which assessed the efficacy of mobile health lifestyle programs that target physical inactivity and obesity.

“Seventy thousand participants in over 60 counties were organized into work site teams to focus on changes in physical activity and the amount of sitting one does,” said Jeffrey T. Kuvin, MD, FACC, ACC Annual Scientific Session chair, associate professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and associate chief of cardiology at Tufts Medical Center.

Jeffrey T. Kuvin

Another trial of interest is a multicenter trial on patients presenting to the ED with code-blue risk, chest discomfort and the risk for over-testing. The trial “will hopefully teach us about engaging patients who present with chest discomfort in a shared decision-making model,” Kuvin said.

“This is a novel technique” because patients actually work with the physician, he added.

Two DANish trials being presented will focus on optimal acute treatment of patients with STEMI. One will look at deferred stenting and the other at ischemic postconditioning during primary PCI. The latest data on transcatheter aortic valve replacement from PARTNER 2 and SAPIEN 3 will also be presented. – by Tracey Romero

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