Heart Podcast

The Heart Podcast pairs James Rudd, digital media editor at the journal Heart, with the author of one paper or review at a time, and the whole conversation is about that paper. The format is plain. Rudd sets up the topic and the guest, the guest explains what they did and what they found, and at the end he thanks them and offers to make the paper open access for a few weeks. That closing offer shapes the show. It sends listeners back to the source, which Rudd notes holds tables, figures and trial detail the conversation never reaches. The subjects cover a wide spread of cardiology. Dr Nasser from the Mayo Clinic discusses her retrospective meta-analysis and systematic review of asymptomatic aortic regurgitation. The finding is blunt: cohorts published after 2000, about 20 years older on average than those in earlier studies, had much higher rates of death and heart failure hospitalization. The contemporary cohorts, she argues, look more like the patients seen in clinical practice. Professor Mariana Fontana, from the Royal Free Hospital in London, the UK's national amyloidosis centre, takes on transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy. Heart failure drugs such as SGLT2 inhibitors, MRAs and low-dose beta blockers are discussed alongside TTR stabilizers, and Rudd calls the gene silencing techniques very exciting indeed. The methods get plenty of attention. A guest based in Sweden walks through his study of premature ventricular complexes in people without structural heart disease: patients from three Stockholm hospitals, four matched controls for each, and inverse probability weighting to adjust for known confounders. Rudd admits to having accidentally promoted him to professor in the introduction, a small moment that shows the show's easy courtesy. Imaging comes up in two conversations. Dr Craig Bamforth, a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a cardiologist, discusses high-risk coronary plaque, a subject Rudd calls close to his own heart, and explains why coronary MRI remains mostly a research tool. The episode 'Cardiac imaging in oncology: the detection of cardiotoxicity' weighs echo and MRI against MUGA, then turns to cardioprotective drugs and follow-up after cancer therapy ends. Atrial fibrillation appears from two angles. The Stockholm study asks whether premature ventricular complexes raise the risk of AF and stroke, while Professor Paulus Kirchhoff of the University of Hamburg reviews anticoagulation for device-detected AF, where two trials found stroke risk lower than expected and bleeding roughly doubled. Throughout, Rudd pulls findings toward practice: what a drug approval in America could mean elsewhere, what evidence the guidelines still lack, what to tell patients. The tone is collegial and exact, and his enthusiasm shows when a guest's work points somewhere new.