Updated August 21 Lively and historic Amsterdam's forthcoming turn as host to the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2023 should go a long way toward righting at least one of the pandemic's countless wrongs.
The city was most recently on annual meeting's rotation in 2020, but ultimately missed out in the year SARS-CoV-2 upended the world and forced the largest medical conferences out of convention halls and into cyberspace.
But ESC-2023 will offer both options as it fills Amsterdam's RAI Exhibition and Congress Centre on August 25 to 28 with a panoply of sessions, 106 of them livestreamed, on the latest cardiology research, controversies, and discussion of social and economic issues affecting clinical practice.
In addition to the meeting's 77 oral abstract sessions and hundreds of moderated ePoster stations, five sessions will be dedicated to four new ESC clinical practice guidelines and a focused update to a prominent guideline from 2 years ago.
Eleven other sessions during the meeting will illustrate and scrutinize the guidelines' relevance to practice.
The new documents cover management of acute coronary syndromes, cardiomyopathies, endocarditis, and patients with diabetes, and, in the focused update, acute and chronic heart failure (HF). A 90-minute guidelines-overview session featuring highlights of all five documents is slated for Day 1 of the Congress.
Few areas of cardiology therapeutics have moved faster than HF in the past few years. Indeed, the HF focused update and its supplementary session scheduled for August 26 and 27, respectively, exemplify one of the conference's main themes.
"The spotlight of the congress is heart failure, still the consequence of many of the problems we try to prevent or treat in cardiology, and indeed the cause of many," this year's program committee chair, John J.V. McMurray, MB ChB, MD, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology.
The HF focused update, he said, "reflects the exciting developments in heart failure treatment over the past couple of years."
One of those developments is likely to be the emergence of SGLT2 inhibitors as a new option for HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), as established by the EMPEROR-Preserved trial. That study, the first solid drug-therapy win in a major randomized HFpEF outcomes trial, was unveiled in its entirety at the 2021 ESC congress — too late to be considered for the society's new HF guidelines showcased at the same meeting.
The 18 sessions in the conference's Great Debates series, conducted and livestreamed across the 4 days, present explorations of contemporary, sometimes divisive questions, including:
Whether to intervene via catheter in acute pulmonary embolism
Anatomical vs functional testing for diagnosing coronary disease
Whether the Universal Definition of Myocardial Infarction (MI) is "flawed and should be put to rest"
"Diuretics in heart failure — friend or foe?"
Whether artificial intelligence will replace cardiologists
The meeting's Hot Line and Late-Breaking Science and Trial Update sessions will feature presentations on randomized trials, observational studies, and other research specially selected by committee for the highest-profile positions on the schedule.
Prominent among the Hot Lines' HF trials, McMurray said, is HEART-FID, a test of intravenous iron in HF with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and iron deficiency. Intravenous iron in such cases, he noted, "seems to improve symptoms and exercise tolerance." However, earlier trials "have left some uncertainty about the effects of this therapy on hospitalization and mortality. HEART-FID is by far the largest trial to date using this treatment and should help answer this question."
Also, the NOAH-AFNET-6 study "attempts to answer the very important clinical question of whether we should use anticoagulant therapy in patients with brief episodes of atrial fibrillation," McMurray said, "a question that comes up almost every day."
He also highlighted ILLUMEN-4, a comparison of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and standard angiography that is one of four OCT presentations in an August 27 Hot Line session.
And, he said, "I'm proud that we have what I believe is the largest-ever randomized mortality/morbidity trial with traditional Chinese medicine in heart failure. That HFrEF study, the QUEST trial, is scheduled for an August 26 Hot Line.
All nine Hot Line presentations are to be streamed live and, per tradition, will conclude with a few minutes of panel discussion and critique from an invited discussant:
Hot Line 1, August 25
STEP HFpEF: Once-weekly semaglutide in people with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and obesity
NOAH-AFNET 6: Oral anticoagulation in patients with atrial high-rate episodes
COP-AF: Colchicine for the prevention of perioperative atrial fibrillation (AF) after major thoracic surgery
Hot Line 2, August 26
Qiliqiangxin in patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction: The QUEST study
BUDAPEST CRT Upgrade: Cardiac resynchronization therapy upgrade in heart failure with right ventricular pacing — a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial
HEART-FID: Ferric carboxymaltose (FCM) in heart failure with iron deficiency
Effects of FCM on recurrent HF hospitalizations: An individual participant data meta-analysis
Hot Line 3, August 26
FIRE trial: Physiology-guided complete percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in older MI Patients
ECLS-SHOCK: Venoarterial membrane oxygenation in cardiogenic shock
STOPDAPT-3: An aspirin-free antithrombotic strategy for PCI
Hot Line 4, August 27
ILUMIEN IV: Optical coherence tomography (OCT) versus angiography
OCT-guided or angiography-guided PCI in complex bifurcation lesions. The OCTOBER trial
OCTIVUS: OCT vs intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)-guided PCI
OCT vs IVUS vs angiography guidance: A real-time updated network meta-analysis
Hot Line 5, August 27
ATTRibute-CM: Acoramidis (AG10) in patients with transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy
ARREST trial: Expedited transfer to a cardiac arrest center for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest
ADVENT: Pulsed field ablation vs thermal ablation (radiofrequency/cryoballoon) for paroxysmal AF
Hot Line 6, August 27
MULTISTARS AMI: Multivessel immediate versus staged revascularization in ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction
CASTLE-HTx: Catheter ablation versus medical therapy to treat AF in end-stage heart failure
The FRAIL-AF randomized controlled trial
Hot Line 7, August 28
Extended clopidogrel monotherapy versus dual antiplatelet therapy in high-risk patients: The OPT-BIRISK trial
DANPACE II — Reducing atrial pacing in sinus-node disease
Hot Line 8, August 28
RED-CVD: Improving early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
NITRATE-CIN: Inorganic nitrate to prevent contrast-induced nephropathy after angiography for acute coronary syndrome
DICTATE-AHF: Early dapagliflozin Initiation in acute heart failure (AHF)
PUSH-AHF: Natriuresis-guided therapy in AHF
Hot Line 9, August 28
RIGHT: Prolongation of anticoagulation after Primary PCI
ONCO DVT Study: Optimal duration of anticoagulation therapy for isolated distal deep vein thrombosis in patients with cancer study
Prospective meta-analysis of SGLT2 inhibitor randomized trials in COVID-19
European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2023.
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Lead image: Digikhmer|Dreamstime.com
Medscape Medical News © 2023
Cite this: Amsterdam Hosts ESC 2023 After Yielding to COVID in 2020 - Medscape - Aug 04, 2023.
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