Interventional Cardiologists Celebrate 20th Anniversary of TCT

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- Interventional cardiologists celebrated the opening today of the 20th annual meeting of the world's largest scientific assembly devoted to catheter-based therapies -- TCT 2008, a gathering of 10,000 attendees.

The sessions mark the coming of age of the field, according to participants in this exclusive MedPage Todayroundtable.

The leitmotif of TCT 2008 (Transcatheter Cardivascular Therapeutics) is an affirmation of the pivotal role of percutaneous interventions, said Roxana Mehran, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and director of clinical research at the data coordinating and analysis center at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation in New York, and Ajay J. Kirtane, M.D., S.M., an assistant clinical professor at Columbia University and director of clinical biometrics at the CRF data coordinating and analysis center.

For the last few years, the TCT meeting has featured studies that defended the safety of drug-eluting stents in response to reports that the use of the stents increased the risk of in-stent thrombosis, but Dr. Mehran said that as more data have accumulated the weight of the evidence favors the safety of drug-eluting stents. Dr. Kirtane agreed, noting that the interventional cardiology world has moved beyond the controversy as the field has matured.

The discussion was moderated by Peggy Peck, executive editor of MedPage Today.