Cardiologists are already old hands at virtual meetings this year and are fast becoming experts on Zoom and other teleconferencing platforms, if not on how to unmute their microphones.
With expectations perhaps elevated and the new communications genre’s novelty on the wane, the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2020 has a chance to both innovate with familiar formats and captivate with the field’s latest research findings.
Although the virtual AHA 2020 might not satisfy longings for face-to-face networking, shop talk, or kidding around over coffee, it will feature many traditional elements of the live conferences adapted for ear buds and small screens. They include late-breaking science (LBS) presentations and panel discussions, poster and live oral abstract presentations, meet-the-trialist talks, fireside-chat discussion forums, early career events, and satellite symposia.
The event may well hold lessons for future iterations of AHA Scientific Sessions in the postpandemic world, which some foresee as, potentially, an amalgam of the time-honored live format and a robust, complementary online presence.
Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones
“I can’t commit to exactly what AHA sessions will look like next November; I think that’s still being looked at,” the organization’s president-elect Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, MD, ScM, chair of the AHA Committee on Scientific Sessions Programming, told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology.
There’s no debating that a live conference is valuable “for career networking and other opportunities, so I don’t think we can do without it. That has to be an important part of it,” he said. “When we can safely, of course.”
Still, “the virtual platform democratizes, right? I mean, it just allows greater access for a broader audience, and I think that’s important, too,” said Lloyd-Jones, MD, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago.
“I don’t think we’ll ever go completely back to it being all in-person,” he said. “I think the world has changed, and we’ll have to adapt our platforms to recognize that.”
Online, at least, meeting registrants will get a better look at Anthony Fauci, MD, than one might from the middle rows of a vast ballroom-turned-auditorium. Fauci is scheduled to speak on “Public Health and Scientific Challenges” during the Main Event Session “Latest Insights on COVID 19 and Cardiovascular Disease,” slated for the meeting’s final day.
Fauci has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, and has been celebrated for his leadership roles in the battles against AIDS and Ebola virus. Today, his name is close to a household word for his service as a prominent though embattled member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
The virtual AHA sessions will feature a core collection of LBS presentations from often high-profile clinical trials and other studies the organization deems worthy of special attention. There are nine such presentations arrayed across the meeting’s five days — from Friday, November 13 to Tuesday, November 17 — at times listed in this story and throughout the AHA Scientific Session program synched with the Central Standard Time (CST) zone of the AHA’s home office in Dallas.
Late-Breaking Science 1. Friday, November 13, 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM CST
The LBS sessions launch with the GALACTIC-HF trial, which — the world recently learned — may expand the burgeoning list of meds shown to improve clinical outcomes in chronic heart failure (HF) with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).
In cursory top-line results announced last month, those in the trial of more than 8000 patients who were randomly assigned to receive omecamtiv mecarbil (Amgen/Cytokinetics/Servier) showed a slight but significant benefit for the primary end point of cardiovascular (CV) death or HF events. The hazard ratio (HR), compared with standard care, was 0.92 (95% CI, 0.86 - 0.99; P = .025), noted a press release from Amgen.
Among the announcement’s few other details was a short take on safety outcomes: no difference in risk for “adverse events, including major ischemic cardiac events,” between the active and control groups. The presentation is sure to provide further insights and caveats, if any, along with other information crucial to the study’s interpretation.
Next on the schedule is the closely watched AFFIRM-AHF, billed as the first major outcomes trial of iron administration to iron-deficient patients with acute HF. It randomly assigned more than 1000 such patients to receive IV ferric carboxymaltose or a placebo. The first dose was given in-hospital and subsequent doses at home for 24 weeks or until patients were no longer iron deficient. They were followed to 1 year for the primary end point of recurrent HF hospitalizations or CV death.
The session wraps with the VITAL Rhythm trial, a substudy of the doubly randomized VITAL trial that explored the effects of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid supplementation on CV and cancer risk in more than 25,000 patients in the community. The substudy explored the effects of two active therapies, a preparation of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) (Omacor, Reliant Pharmaceuticals) or vitamin D3 supplements, on new-onset atrial fibrillation (AF) as the primary end point; it also looked at risk for sudden death.