Professor Glenn N. Levine from USA was invited to our hospital for anacademic visiting in the afternoonof October 21st. Professor Levine is the director of cardiac care unitof Michael E. DeBakeyMedical center, Baylor College of Medicine, USA. He is also thechairman of writing committeein charge of updating guidelines, including 2015 ACC / AHA dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) guideline and 2015 ACC / AHAPCI guideline. Additionally, he is the chair of ACC/AHA Task Force on practice guidelines.

Prof. Jinyu Huang, the vicepresident of Hangzhou First People’s Hospital,introduced our hospital and prof. YizhouXu gave a detailed introduction of our cardiology department. Professor Levine began this AHA professional workshop with the speech of “The Evolution of Antiplatelet Therapy in Acute Coronary Syndromes (ACS) and Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI)”. During this lecture, Professor Levine brought the latest progress of antiplatelet therapy, and he pointed out: 

1) Platelet activation and aggregation is the critical cause of thrombus formation among the patients with acute coronary syndrome. 

2) Dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT)has been proved to play a great role in decreasing the complications of ischemic and restenosis.

3)Shorter durationof DAPT could be used in patientswho received the new drugeluting stent (DES) treatment with high bleeding risk; longer duration of DAPT is more reasonable to be applied in patients who have the medical history of myocardial infarction/ ACSor low bleeding risk.

4)Most of DAPT studies only involvea small number of patients from Asia.Compared with Western patients, the ischemicrisk of Asian patients may on the lower level, while the risk of bleeding is higher.In the end, Prof. Xianhua Ye from our cardiology department provided the lecture of “Intervention Therapy for high-risk patients with multi-vessel coronary disease".

Professor Levine fullyaffirmed and surprised with the skillful and excellent performance of cardiovascular interventional therapy of our department. And our cardiologists also actively participate in this academic workshop and have a heated discussion with Professor Levine.