Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
There is much debate surrounding the etiology of cognitive decline following CABG surgery. In this Viewpoint, Neuropsychologist Ola Selnes postulates that this worrying complication is likely to be attributable to patient-related factors, such as the extent of pre-existing cerebrovascular disease, rather than to cardiopulmonary bypass.
In light of the recent furore over late stent thrombosis and drug-eluting stents, Drs Stephan Windecker and Peter Jüni present their thorough review of the benefits and risks of first-generation sirolimus-eluting and paclitaxel-eluting stents, providing practical advice on the use of these devices in different patient groups.
The premature termination of the torcetrapib trial in December 2006 was widely publicized. A year on, Anatol Kontush, Maryse Guérin and M John Chapman revisit cholesteryl ester transfer protein inhibition as a potential therapeutic target and review recent developments in HDL-raising therapy with a focus on torcetrapib trials.
Förstermann reviews oxidative stress—the enzymes responsible for generating reactive oxygen species and the enzymatic and nonprotein systems designed to protect from vascular disease. He discusses how oxidative stress is involved in endothelial dysfunction, how it contributes to vascular disease, and by what therapeutic approaches it could be prevented.
In this month's Case Study, De Visser and colleagues present a 75-year-old male patient with a recent history of transient ischemic attack who underwent routine cardiological evaluation before a cystectomy. He was found to have coronary artery disease and an aortic valve papillary fibroelastoma—a rare, benign cardiac tumor. Multislice CT was successfully used to visualize the tumor and coronary arteries, before the patient underwent surgical excision of the tumor and an end-to-side anastomosis of the left internal mammary artery and the left anterior descending coronary artery.
