The first report of the ERCTO registry by the EuroCTO club shows a high procedural success rate obtained by expert European operators in a "real-world" consecutive series of patients, comparable with those reported by Japanese registries. The rate of observed procedural adverse events was low and similar to the non-CTO PCI series. In this registry, retrograde procedures were associated with extended fluoroscopy exposure and procedural time, increased contrast load administration as well as a higher incidence of coronary perforations. Such outcomes should become the standard of care that all centres undertaking CTO PCI should aspire to.

The largest cohort to date of patients with secundum ASD shows that treatment by a percutaneous approach has a significantly lower rate of either total or major early postprocedural complications compared to surgery.

Direct stenting without predilation in selected lesions seems to be a safe and successful procedure that provides a way to contain cost and to shorten radiation exposure time.

No abstract

This study shows that stress echo in patients with hypertension yields a satisfactory diagnostic accuracy for identifying significant epicardial CAD. Our results indicate that dobutamine might be superior to dipyridamole. The low specificity of myocardial scintigraphy probably relates to the fact that this method traces perfusion abnormalities, not necessarily caused by epicardial CAD, possibly due to microvascular disease and not causing obvious wall motion abnormalities.