A new antibiotic to treat stubborn urinary tract infection (UTI) and a blood-clot-dissolving intravenous treatment for acute ischemic stroke have been granted approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It's been nearly three decades since adjacent treatments have entered the market to treat their respective conditions.
This comes as it was announced last week that a further 3,500 jobs at the FDA would be cut, with some existing review staff now with double the workload due to previous personnel losses. But for now, it's good news in some health fields with these two drugs getting a green light.
GSK's Blujepa (gepotidacin) becomes the first in a new class of oral antibiotics to treat uncomplicated UTIs (also known as uUTIs) in almost 30 years, taking aim at infection-causing bacteria Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Citrobacter freundii complex, Staphylococcus saprophyticus and Enterococcus faecalis.
In sharp contrast to earlier studies, patients with severe triple-vessel heart disease fared equally well whether they underwent open-heart bypass surgery (CABG) or a less invasive procedure called PCI (percutaneous coronary intervention) at five years of follow-up, according to research presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session (ACC.25) on March 30 in Chicago. The research was simultaneously published in The Lancet.
Patients enrolled in the study, known as FAME-3, had triple-vessel heart disease, a severe form of heart disease in which three of the major arteries that supply blood to the heart become inflamed or partially blocked by cholesterol deposits, causing chest pain and shortness of breath and often leading to a heart attack. An estimated 68 million people in the United States will develop triple-vessel heart disease during their lifetime, the majority of whom are men.
World’s smallest pacemaker fits in a syringe and is activated by light
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
April 04, 2025
Engineers at Illinois' Northwestern University have developed the tiniest pacemaker you'll ever see. It's several times smaller than a regular pacemaker, and it's designed for patients several times smaller than the average pacemaker user.
This device is dwarfed by a grain of rice, and can be injected into newborn babies with congenital heart diseases for temporary or long-term use with a regular syringe. About one in every 100 children are born with such defects.
This project was led by Northwestern professor John A. Rogers, who you might remember from clever inventions like a wearable to detect when singers are straining their vocal cords, and a diminutive gadget to deliver more realistic feedback than ever before. His team published a paper on this work in the journal Nature this week.
Valvular heart disease (VHD) is a potentially fatal condition, yet it's difficult to diagnose with a regular stethoscope. A possibly life-saving new multi-sensor stethoscope is claimed to be much better at the job, with the added benefit that it can be used by just about anyone.
VHD occurs when one or more of the heart's four valves don't open or close properly, leading to blood flow issues. According to the American Heart Association, the malady ranks among the highest contributors to global deaths from cardiovascular disease.
Unfortunately, the condition can be quite advanced by the time symptoms become noticeable. Even then, those symptoms are often misdiagnosed as being caused by respiratory ailments – this can happen even when a general practitioner listens to the patient's heart with a conventional single-sensor stethoscope.
World's first "nonstop beating heart" transplant is a medical breakthrough
By Bronwyn Thompson
April 17, 2025
For the first time, surgeons have successfully performed a remarkable new heart transplant in which the donor organ never skips a beat in the process, reducing the damage that can occur during such a complex operation. It ushers in a new era of more successful heart transplant surgery.
A team of surgeons at the National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) in Taipei undertook the revolutionary operation, during which the donor heart continues beating between the organ removal and transplantation stages. Traditionally, the donor heart would be removed and preserved in cold storage to reduce its workload – during this stage, it's considered "ischemic time," or the period during which the organ is cut off from blood supply. This comes with the risk of heart damage and rejection once it's transplanted into a recipient.
When the heart is deprived of blood, ischemia – a shortage of oxygen – can damage its muscle tissue, or myocardium, reducing function and health once it is transplanted. While an organ set for transplant rarely endures more than a few hours in ischemic time, it can still lead to myocardial damage.
Combo attack can neutralize high blood pressure death risk
By Paul McClure
April 29, 2025
A recent study examined how managing eight different heart disease risk factors significantly reduced the likelihood of premature death in people with high blood pressure. It highlights the need for a broad approach to preventing or treating hypertension.
As a major cause of premature death globally, high blood pressure or hypertension is well-researched. However, most studies look at how managing a single risk factor – eating a balanced diet, for example – affects the condition.
Now, new research, a US-Chinese collaboration, has examined how managing multiple cardiovascular risk factors at the same time – things like cholesterol levels, smoking, and weight – impacts hypertension.
Screening for common genetic variants in addition to rare genetic variants can help improve patient risk stratification for heart failure, according to a recent study published in Nature Genetics led by investigators at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Much of the focus, at least on the clinical side, has been looking at rare genetic variants and testing for them and determining your heart failure risk. But based on our results, the common genetic variants in your genome can contribute just as much, if not more than, rare genetic variants to your heart failure risk," said David Lee, MD, Ph.D., a resident physician in internal medicine at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University and lead author of the study.
Heart failure affects more than 60 million people worldwide, according to the World Heart Federation, and is the leading cause of unplanned hospitalizations in the United States for individuals 65 years and older.
New & old drug combo drops cholesterol by 49% in human trial
By Paul McClure
May 18, 2025
Some people can’t get their bad cholesterol levels down, even if they take cholesterol-lowering meds. A new clinical trial using a combination of existing and not-yet-released cholesterol tablets lowered bad cholesterol by almost half in people at high risk of heart disease.
We understand how high levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL or “bad”) cholesterol can lead to plaque buildup on arteries, increasing the risk of a heart attack or stroke. But the cause of high cholesterol is multifactorial, and for some people, cholesterol-lowering medications like statins aren’t effective.
In a new study led by the Cleveland Clinic, researchers trialed the combination of an existing cholesterol medication with a brand-new one and found that, together, the drugs lowered LDL cholesterol levels by a staggering 48.6%.
Fiber produces up to a 20% drop in heart risk for most people
By Paul McClure
June 01, 2025
A new study has found that, for most of us, the fiber we eat can protect our heart health, lowering the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease or stroke by up to 20%. It’s more evidence showing that a healthy gut leads to a healthy heart.
When the fiber you eat reaches the large intestine, some of it is broken down by gut bacteria, which release short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) as a by-product. These SCFAs play a crucial role in the gut-heart axis, contributing significantly to heart health protection, predominantly by lowering blood pressure.
New research by Monash University has demonstrated, for the first time, just how important these gut microbes and the SCFAs they produce are to heart health. They did so by examining the health of people with a rare genetic variant that significantly impacts the function of receptors that bind to SCFAs.
Blood clotting discovery opens "whole new chapter in vascular biology"
By Paul McClure
June 05, 2025
Researchers have identified a previously unknown biological process that causes tissue and organ damage in conditions where oxygen is low, such as heart attacks and strokes. The study suggests that bursting red blood cells, not blood clots, are the culprits.
The microvasculature, the body’s network of tiny blood vessels, is critical for delivering oxygen and nutrients to tissues. Damage to these vessels can contribute to life-threatening conditions like heart attack and stroke. In these conditions, microvascular dysfunction leads to poor blood flow, lack of oxygen, tissue death, and inflammation, all of which can worsen outcomes.
A new study by a team of researchers from institutes in Australia and New York has identified a previously unknown biological process that causes tissue and organ damage in low-oxygen conditions. It’s driven by red blood cells and not the blood clots traditionally associated with this sort of damage.
Potentially life-saving device puts the squeeze – and the roll – on blood clots
By Ben Coxworth
June 07, 2025
When trying to remove life-threatening clots from blood vessels, current technologies are successful on only about half of the first attempts – if at all. A new surgical tool, however, is claimed to boost that figure to an astounding 90%.
Although blood clots are partially made up of red blood cells, they're held together by tangles of a thread-like protein known as fibrin. Existing clot-removal treatments typically involve inserting a device into the affected blood vessel via a catheter, then using that device to either suck up the fibrin clump or snare it then drag it out.
Whichever the case, the fibrin often gets inadvertently broken up in the process, with some of the pieces proceeding to travel down the blood vessel. Those fragments could ultimately form into new blood clots, in locations that are more difficult to reach.
Mass General Brigham researchers have developed a new AI tool in collaboration with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to probe through previously collected CT scans and identify individuals with high coronary artery calcium (CAC) levels that place them at a greater risk for cardiovascular events. Their research, published in NEJM AI, showed the tool called AI-CAC had high accuracy and predictive value for future heart attacks and 10-year mortality. Their findings suggest that implementing such a tool widely may help clinicians assess their patients' cardiovascular risk.
"Millions of chest CT scans are taken each year, often in healthy people, for example to screen for lung cancer. Our study shows that important information about cardiovascular risk is going unnoticed in these scans," said senior author Hugo Aerts, Ph.D., director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) Program at Mass General Brigham.
"Our study shows that AI has the potential to change how clinicians practice medicine and enable physicians to engage with patients earlier, before their heart disease advances to a cardiac event."
Cardiologists use echocardiography to diagnose a range of functional or structural abnormalities of the heart. Using more than 100 videos and images that capture different parts of the heart, echocardiographers make dozens of measurements, such as the heart's size and shape, ventricle thickness, and the movement and function of each heart chamber, to assess patient heart health.
A new study published in JAMA led by Yale School of Medicine (YSM) researchers finds that an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tool can interpret echocardiograms with a high degree of accuracy in just a few minutes.
"Echocardiography is a cornerstone of cardiovascular care, but it requires a tremendous amount of clinical time from highly skilled readers to review these studies," says Rohan Khera, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine (cardiovascular medicine) at YSM and of biostatistics (health informatics) at Yale School of Public Health.
Khera is the paper's senior author and director of the Cardiovascular Data Science Lab (CarDS). "We wanted to develop a technology that can assist these very busy echocardiographers to help improve accuracy and accelerate their workflow."
New findings by a team of molecular biologists at Brown University on the critical role of a protein called AIMP3 in heart function could inform new treatments for heart disease.
In a study published in Nature Cardiovascular Research, the researchers showed that removing AIMP3 from heart cells in mice led to severe heart problems, including inflammation, scarring and fatal heart failure.
"AIMP3 is a protein that had never been studied in the heart and was of unclear function," said study author Federica Accornero, an associate professor of biochemistry at Brown who is affiliated with the University's RNA Center. "What we discovered is that cardiac AIMP3 is crucial for survival."
An international team of researchers led by Professor Morris Brown FRS at Queen Mary University of London found that Baxdrostat, a drug belonging to a new class of aldosterone synthase inhibitors, led to an average fall in blood pressure of 25 mmHg. This is two to three times the reduction typically achieved by a single antihypertensive drug.
The results, published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at ENDO 2025 in San Francisco, offer hope for a new safe and effective treatment for primary aldosteronism, a hugely under-diagnosed condition.
Weekend activity cuts heart death risk by 33%, large new study finds
By Bronwyn Thompson
July 25, 2025
https://newatlas.com/diabetes/weekend-workout-diabetes/
Adding to the growing body of evidence supporting the health benefits of cramming all your weekly exercise into two days, a large new study has found that it can significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular mortality in adults with diabetes.
Researchers from medical institutions including Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston University School of Public Health and Vanderbilt University Medical Center found that for those living with diabetes – predominantly type 2 – the current recommendation of 150 minutes of exercise a week didn't have to be spread out over seven days to significantly lower the risk of dying from heart disease, and reduce overall disease mortality. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in adults with diabetes.
Known as the "weekend warrior" approach, this mode of working out has gained a lot of attention in the last five years as researchers look to uncover how you can get the most health "bang for your buck" when it comes to exercise. A 2022 study showed that weekend workouts lower risk of premature death, while in 2023, scientists found that adults cramming all their minutes into Saturday and Sunday bursts of activity reaped the same heart benefits as those who spread things out across the week.
