Active clinical trials for "Coronary Artery Disease"

Objective: The purpose of the present study is to assess if perioperative variation of Brain Natriuretic Peptide (BNP) levels is a predictor of mortality and morbidity after cardiac surgery.Material and Methods: 500 consecutive patients will be enrolled prospectively in this study before cardiac surgery under cardiopulmonary bypass. BNP levels will be measured prior to surgery and at postoperative day 1. Variations of BNP levels will be analyzed to determine if it is a predictor of mortality and morbidity after cardiac surgery. This dynamic evaluation will be compared to other tools of risk stratification in cardiac surgery as the EuroScore. All patients will be followed 3 years after the procedure. Hypothesis: Perioperative BNP variations may be more sensitive than pre- or postoperative BNP levels alone. Furthermore the perioperative homeostasis will be measured to assess its impact on BNP secretion during the perioperative period.

Background. Clinical benefits of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) have been clearly demonstrated in heart failure (HF) patients with severe left ventricular (LV) dysfunction and wide QRS at surface electrocardiogram. However, there is a growing evidence that QRS duration poorly predicts responses to CRT, and that ~30% of patients do not experience any benefit from CRT when pre-implant dyssynchrony is defined according to electrocardiographic criteria. A number of echocardiographic criteria have been proposed to assess mechanical LV dyssynchrony, but at present there is no consensus on their use to predict response to CRT. Study Design. The Italian Multicenter PROject on echo assessment of left VEntricular (IMPROVE) dyssynchrony study is a prospective, multicenter, observational study aimed to assess feasibility and predictive power of mechanical dyssynchrony assessed by echocardiography in consecutive consenting patients candidate to CRT by clinical and electrocardiographic criteria. IMPROVE will enroll 120 healthy subjects and 216 HF patients in 6 sites in Italy. CRT response criteria will be based on improvement in NYHA class and LV reverse remodeling evaluated by 3D-echocardiography. Enrollment is expected to conclude early 2009. Implications. CRT is today part of the therapeutic armamentarium for symptomatic HF patients refractory to medical therapy, with wide QRS complex and severe LV systolic dysfunction. The IMPROVE study has been designed to evaluate reference values of indexes of ultrasound mechanical dyssynchrony that have been proposed in the literature and compare their ability to predict response to CRT in HF patients.

The main purpose of this study is to examine the contribution of personality traits to marital satisfaction and well -being among couples coping with Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) and couples from the general population, and to health promoting behaviors and physical recovery among the ill partners.

The trial will investigate the accuracy of Dual Source CT coronary angiography to detect coronary artery stenoses in patients with chest pain who have, based on clinical criteria, an intermediate likelihood for the presence of coronary artery stenoses. No beta blockers will be used to lower the heart rate for the examination. The hypothesis is that Dual Source CT will allow the detection of vessels with at least one coronary artery stenosis with a sensitivity of more than 90%.

Coffee is a worldwide drink, been part of any culture. There are some concerns about effects of coffee on the health. Recently, epidemiological studies have shown benefits of coffee drinking to diabetics and also to prevent diabetes in populations. We aim to understand some effects of coffee and not only caffeine over vascular system, in special coronary artery disease patients, diabetics end normal people.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the safety and long-term effectiveness of coronary stenting with the everolimus-eluting stent (EES) and to determine clinical device and procedural success during commercial use of EES in the real world. The investigators will compare EES (Xience/Promus, prospective arm) with sirolimus-eluting stent (SES, Cypher, retrospective arm).

Assessment of Change in AtheROSclerotic Plaque by Serial CCTA (ACROSS) is designed as a prospective observational study which aim is to demonstrate the effect of statins on coronary atherosclerosis, assessed by quantitative analysis of CCTA.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) on cardiac function in multi-vessel disease patients with concurrent chronic total occlusion (CTO) lesion.

Myocardial protection is of crucial importance for surgical coronary revascularization in patients with ischaemic heart diseases. The investigators proposed loop isolation-based uploading preconditioning to protect heart from ischemic-reperfusion damage (LiuPhD) as a novel cardioprotective strategy, and applied to patients who underwent on-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).

This is a cross-sectional and follow-up study. We analysis the relationship of sleep quality on coronary artery disease(CAD) and in stent restenosis(ISR). Further, we explore the mechanism of relationship between the sleep quality and CAD/ ISR by examining the biomarkers in the pathway of sleep-CAD/ISR.