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Hi everyone, this is John Mandrola from the Heart.org Medscape Cardiology and this is this week in

Cardiology for January 3rd 2020. Happy New Year everyone. This week Excel again, noble 5-year results, alcohol and AFIB, cardiac devices, hospital

consolidation.

Now the debate surrounding the left main PCI versus Cabbage trial is back in the news. The These included the original debate about the definitions of MI in Excel and how it favored

PCI, the signal of higher mortality in the PCI arm, and of course the lack of concordance from the

results data and the manuscript's

conclusion of equivalence of the two techniques.

In fact, this lack of concordance between the data and the conclusions led Dr. David

Taggart, an Oxford surgeon and member of the Excel

trials leadership to withdraw his name from the New England manuscript.

Then came the BBC Newsnight program that discovered that the authors did not report a key secondary

endpoint which was MI as defined by the universal definition. BBC had a leaked data set that

showed that the MI as defined by universal definition

was in fact 80% higher in the PCI arm.

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