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5th Annual CICT Interventional Cardiology Meeting in San Francisco
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July 21,
2011 -- San Francisco -- A small select group of interventional
cardiologists will be meeting next weekend in San Francisco to
discuss angioplasty, stents, valves, medical therapies, lasers:
all sorts of devices that can be delivered to patients' hearts,
kidneys,
necks, legs with catheter-based interventions. In less than four
months, 10,000 of these physicians
will be descending on this City by the Bay for the annual TCT
meeting, the largest of its type in the world. But on July 29
and 30, less than 100 cardiologists will be discussing
and
debating the best ways to treat patients with coronary artery
disease. |
The conference is the 5th Annual CICT Interventional
Cardiology Meeting, subtitled "A Case-Based Workshop". As explained
to Angioplasty.Org by Co-Director
Dr. Issam D. Moussa, MD, FSCAI of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville,
Florida, the purpose of this meeting is for a small group of cardiologists
to discuss cases in depth and without the distractions of late-breaking
clinical trials, multiple concurrent sessions, breakfast symposia,
evening satellite events and the types of mass events that occur
in the big major meetings.
There is nothing wrong with those large
meetings, Dr. Moussa stated. They're important and necessary. But
the CICT provides a different type of discussion. His goal is for
the attendees to fit into a single room, small enough in number
to have a meaningful and extensive discussion about very important
issues that have to do with how best to treat a patient in a specific
situation. A wide range of topics will be covered: chronic total
occlusions, unprotected left main stenting, the value of fractional
flow reserve,
percutaneous valve repair (aortic and mitral), Excimer lasers,
the transradial approach to PCI, drug-eluting balloons -- even
a final session on the treatment of vascular erectile dysfunction
with angioplasty.
How do these discussions fit in with
the recent news stories about appropriateness of stenting and the
clinical
guidelines
formulated
by the professional
societies? Dr. Moussa pointed out that "guidelines now have
a halo around them", but that they must always be seen in the
light of the individual patient and situation. Guidelines are based
on randomized
clinical trials that have been conducted with very specific patient
populations in very specific conditions, but what if you are confronted
with a patient who was not studied in
those
trials
--
for example,
an 83-year-old man who may benefit from angioplasty. How do you make
decisions about his therapy? Dr. Moussa proclaims, "As
physicians, we should hold clinical judgment above every other element
of decision-making."
The CICT Meeting was started as a kind of tribute
to Dr. Antonio Colombo, a visionary interventional cardiologist who
has always thought "outside the box" -- in the early days of stenting,
he was the first to see why stents were not giving the results they
should.
By inspecting
stented
arteries with intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) he saw greatly under-expanded
stents that had not been deployed fully and were therefore causing
problems, high rates of restenosis and thrombosis. He pioneered the
high-pressure balloon expansion of these stents and results radically
improved, benefiting patients worldwide.
Originally the CICT Meeting was limited to faculty
only, but in the past few years a small number of attendees have
been welcomed. Joining Drs. Moussa and Colombo will be stent inventor
Julio Palmaz, David Kandzari, Ted Feldman, Maurice Buchbinder, Murat
Tuzcu, and many more -- physicians who have been chief investigators
for many of the most well-known clinical trials. You can see the
entire list and program on the CICT
web site.
Reported by Burt Cohen, July 21, 2011
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