Almanac 2012: interventional cardiology: the national society journals present selected research that has driven recent advances in clinical cardiology.

The field of interventional cardiology continues to progress quickly. The efficacy of percutaneous interventions with newer generation drug-eluting stents has advanced a lot over the last decade. This improvement in stent performance has broadened the level of indication towards more complex interventions such as left main and multi-vessel PCI. Major improvements continue in the field of medical co-therapy such as antiplatelet therapies (bivalirudin, prasugrel, ticagrelor) and this will further improve outcomes of PCI. The same is true for intravascular imaging such as ultrasound IVUS and optical coherence tomography OCT. However, interventional cardiology has become a rather broad field, also including alcohol septal ablation for hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, etc. At the moment, the fastest growing area is the structural interventions, especially for aortic valve stenosis (transcatheter aortic valve implantation TAVI) and for mitral regurgitation (mitral clipping). This review covers recent advances in all these different fields of interventional cardiology.