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Editorials

Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions

Keeping Pace With Progress

David P. Faxon, MD

From the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Mass.

Correspondence to David Faxon, MD, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 1620 Tremont St, BC-3-12P, Boston, MA 02120. E-mail dfaxon@partners.org

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Welcome to the first issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions, the fourth of 6 new journals to join the AHA family. The AHA Scientific Publishing Committee made the decision to expand the AHA journals because it recognized that to fulfill its mission to widely and effectively disseminate scientific information, it should more effectively address the needs of the subspecialty areas in cardiology.

Interventional cardiology, perhaps more than other fields of cardiology, has realized tremendous growth. For my younger colleagues, it is hard to remember the time before coronary angioplasty. Early pioneers like Charles Dotter, Melvin Judkins, and Eberhardt Zeitler introduced the concept of peripheral angioplasty in the 1960s, but it was not until Andreas Gruentzig developed a unique inelastic balloon catheter that permitted access to small and tortuous coronary vessels that coronary angioplasty become a reality. His genius was not only that he dared to perform the first coronary angioplasty in September of 1977 (only 31 years ago) but that he carefully and thoughtfully guided the early development of the procedure with the power of his personality and his commitment to careful scientific evaluation. As a result, a new revolutionary procedure was born, and it has changed cardiology for ever.

The remarkable story of the past, present, and future of interventional cardiology is the subject of the review included in this first issue by Drs Holmes and Williams. Today, coronary interventions have grown to become the most frequently performed coronary revascularization procedures in the United States, with more than 1.2 . . . [Full Text of this Article]