WASHINGTON—Too many children and adults living with congenital heart disease (CHD) are being left behind by a system that doesn’t adequately value their care. That’s the message of a new policy statement from the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions (SCAI) that highlights broken reimbursement models, undervalued procedures, and barriers to device innovation.  

The statement, “Economic Barriers to Interventional Cardiology Care for Adults and Children With Congenital Heart Disease and Potential Policy Solutions,” was published today in JSCAI. It calls for Medicaid payment parity, fairer valuation of CHD procedures, new compensation models, and faster pathways for pediatric device approval.  

Adiposity—or the accumulation of excess fat in the body—is a known driver of cardiometabolic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease. But getting the full picture of a person’s risk is harder than it may seem. Traditional measures such as body mass index (BMI) are imperfect, conflating fat and muscle mass and not capturing where in the body fat is located. A new study from researchers at Mass General Brigham and their colleagues found that an AI tool designed to measure body composition could accurately capture details in just three minutes from a body scan. Their results, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, show that not all fat is equally harmful and highlight the potential of using AI to repurpose data from routine scans.

The American College of Cardiology (ACC) released today its second Scientific Statement, Inflammation and Cardiovascular Disease (CVD). The statement emphasizes years of clinical and basic science research, confirming that inflammation is an important underlying contributor to several CVDs, including coronary artery disease and heart failure.