TCT Debates Cardiology's "Climate of Calamity"

The real story that came out of this year's Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) meeting held in October in Washington, DC, is not the news per se regarding specific clinical trial results or new device technologies. Instead, it is the story behind the news. Interventional cardiology has been built on the back of evidence-based medicine. As the leading interventional cardiovascular conference, TCT--now in its 19th year--has long been the crucible for the unveiling of data from the randomized clinical trials and other studies that account for this specialty's historically rapid adoption of new device technology.

That methodology, however, has come under attack in the last year, creating what Martin B. Leon, MD, TCT's co-director, calls...