This year marks the 33rd annual meeting of the European Society for Vascular Surgery (ESVS), Europe’s leading scientific meeting for vascular surgery. The meeting took place in Hamburg, Germany, and offered a rich scientific programme, which included 200 fast-track oral presentations, more than 200 poster presentations, as well as expert faculty-led symposia showcasing the very best of recent research and innovation in the field.
For their fifth annual meeting, the European Society of Vascular Medicine (ESVM) met on 10–12 October 2019 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for a joint congress with the European Chapter of the International Union of Angiology, the Central European Vascular Forum, and the Slovenian Society for Vascular Diseases. The scientific programme covered the full spectrum of vascular diseases and included several presentations and discussions on the topic of peripheral artery disease (PAD).
Around 5400 participants from 105 countries made their way to Athens, Greece for the 6th annual Heart Failure Congress, organized by the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). The conference brings together a broad range of specialists and non-specialists to discuss every aspect of heart failure (HF), from acute to chronic and from prevention to treatment. Reflecting the broad range of participants and topics, the programme featured a mix of symposia, practical tutorials, ‘Guidelines in Daily Practice’ sessions, debate sessions and more.
This familiar question underpins treatment decisions in clinical practice. In preventative medicine, benefit–risk assessment is especially important, because a patient may not see any perceivable benefit in terms of symptom relief – most of the benefit comes from the prevention of events.
Half of patients diagnosed with PAD undergo a revascularization procedure to restore blood flow to the limb and relieve symptoms. However, only one-quarter of these patients are reported to be free of symptoms after 1 year. Within 1 year of a revascularization procedure, more than half of patients will either have died or have survived after having undergone amputation.
Renal impairment is a widespread co-morbidity among patients with atherosclerotic disease. In the REACH registry, more than one-third of patients with stable atherosclerosis had a creatinine clearance lower than 60 ml/min, equivalent to moderate or severe renal impairment.
F is also a serious risk factor for events in patients who have CAD that is sufficiently advanced to require PCI. In a study of 5006 patients in the Melbourne Interventional Group registry, the 189 patients with HF had more than double the risk of death, MI or target revascularization within 1 year of PCI than patients without HF (28.6% vs 12.5%). This further underlines the importance of addressing the high thrombotic risk in patients with HF.