Batra Hospital and Medical Research Center, Delhi

Cardiovascular diseases have now become the leading cause of mortality in India. 25 to 30% mortality in our country is attributable to heart attacks, brain strokes and heart failure. The Global Burden of disease in India is estimated at age-standardized death rate of 272 per 100,000 population. It is higher than the global average of 235 per 100000 populations. The other peculiarities in our country are a younger age at presentation, an accelerated course of disease and high mortality. Preventive strategies are therefore the keys to reduce this alarming trend because once it manifests, most treatment strategies are at best palliative. The World Heart federation and World Health Organization every year has marked last Saturday of September as the “World Heart day”. This year the theme of the World Heart Day is to make 3 Promises. “ Eat more healthily”, “ get more active ” and “ say no to Smoking ”. These three do’s can go a long way in preventing a heart attack and keep you he...

Occupational contact dermatitis is a skin condition caused by work-related exposures. It occurs in workers who are exposed to irritating or allergenic substances or specific physical factors in the workplace. Eliminating or preventing exposure to these agents or conditions can largely prevent the occurrence, and if already present, the severity of OCD. The disease is most common amongst nurses, food handlers, hairdressers and beauty therapists, motor mechanics, cleaners, construction workers and specialized epoxy workers, printers and those within the health care and manufacturing industries. In most western industrialized countries, OCD is one of the most commonly reported and underestimated occupational disease with international estimates of incidence varying between 50-190 cases per 100, 000 full-time workers per year. Specific OCD prevention activities derived from the literature and analysis of the data suggest that the largest gains are likely to be made by targ...

Link to the original article Dr Upendra Kaul, Chairman Cardiology BHMRC co-chairs a path breaking study  In the first randomized trial of an Indian-made stent versus the best-in-class Xience stent (Abbott) conducted in Europe, the Supraflex sirolimus-eluting stent (SMT; Surat, India) proved itself to be a worthy competitor in results presented here at TCT 2018. In the TALENT trial, the rate of a device-oriented composite endpoint of cardiac death, target-vessel MI, and clinically indicated TLR at 12 months was 4.9% with Supraflex and 5.3% with Xience, a difference that met criteria for noninferiority ( P < 0.001), study chair Patrick Serruys, MD, PhD (Imperial College London, England, and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands), reported. Though there were no significant differences between groups for any of the components of the composite outcome, a per-protocol analysis suggested that TLR might be lower with Supraflex, which is not available in the ...