Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation On the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Dr Greg Hundley: I'm Dr Greg Hundley, also Associate Editor, the Director of the Pauley Heart Center at VCU Health in Richmond, Virginia. Dr Carolyn Lam: Say, Greg, you know the feature paper this week talks about the perennially hot topic now and that is transcatheter aortic valve replacement or TAVR or TAVI. It's actually data from the France TAVI Registry comparing balloon expandable versus self-expanding transcatheter aortic valve replacement. I'm sure you want to hear more about it, but first I'm going to tell you about another paper in the same issue, this time also comparing a balloon expandable versus a self-expanding transcatheter aortic valve implantation, but data from a nationwide analysis and from corresponding author Dr Fauchier from Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Trousseau. He and his colleagues basically did a head to head comparison of the two competing transcatheter aortic valve replacement technologies that have been published but have not really been followed for long-term clinical outcomes. This was comparing balloon expandable versus self-expanding technology. They collected information from more than 31,000 consecutive patients treated with Tavern in France between 2014 and 2018 and based this on the French administrative hospital discharge database. They did propensity score matching, which was used for the analysis of outcomes according to the Sapien 3 balloon expandable versus the Evolut R self-expanding TAVR technology and studied this as nationwide level in France. Dr Greg Hundley: Wow. Carolyn, 31,000 patients. That's a really large study. What did they find? Dr Carolyn Lam: They basically found that balloon expandable TAVR was associated with lower mortality rehospitalization heart failure and pacemaker implantation compared with the self-expanding TAVR. Now, that's of course a pretty big finding and this is discussed along with the feature paper that we're going to hear about in an editorial by Drs. Abdel-Wahab and Thiele from Heart Center Leipzig. I want to tell you about another paper before I let you tell you about yours, okay? Dr Greg Hundley: Sounds great, Carolyn. Dr Carolyn Lam: Greg, what is your clinical impression of Impella use in the United States among patients undergoing PCI? Do you think it's increasing or decreasing over time? As a reminder, Impella was approved for mechanical circulatory support in 2008, so from then, what do you think? Dr Greg Hundley: You know, Carolyn, I really think it's increasing, especially used more frequently rather than an intra-aortic balloon pump. How about you? What's going on in your area of the world? Dr Carolyn Lam: My impression too, but you know, you're lucky because we now have data looking at the trends in Impella use, but in the United States, and this comes from the corresponding author, Dr Amit Amin from Washington University School of Medicine and colleagues who describe clinical outcomes and costs across U.S. hospitals in PCI patients treated with mechanical circulatory support, which is either the Impella or the intra-aortic balloon pump. They found that among more than 48,300 real world patients undergoing PCI with mechanical circulatory support at 432 hospitals between 2004 and 2016 in the Premier Healthcare Database, Impella use was indeed found to be rapidly increasing with marked variability across hospitals and not only its use, but also in its associated adverse outcomes. When analyzed by time periods or at the level of the hospitals or at the level of the patients, Impella use was associated with higher rates of adverse events and higher hospital costs. Dr Greg Hundley: You know, I wasn't thinking about the higher rate of adverse events. You wonder sometimes, are we using a technology in a s