Fátima Rodríguez

Prevalence of Apolipoprotein B and LDL Cholesterol Discordance: Insights From the VLDbL and NHANES

AUG 1BallantyneAtherosclerosis

Factors Associated With Enhanced LDL-Cholesterol Lowering With Bempedoic Acid Among Statin-Intolerant Patients From Clear Outcomes

SEP 1ZhengJACC Advances

Deep learning quantifies aortic valve calcification on routine chest CT with near-perfect expert correlation.

May enable opportunistic AVC scoring on routine CT; leaves open prospective validation before clinical adoption.

Calling Attention to Underrecognized Risk

Health Care Professionals’ Perceptions of AI in Clinical Practice: Productivity, Enjoyment, and Pay

Cross-sectional survey reveals low adoption and demographic disparities in AI attitudes among health care professionals, highlighting gaps between technological promise and medical reality.

JUL 22SafarovaEuropean Journal of Preventive Cardiology

Elevated Lp(a) increases premature ASCVD risk, supporting universal testing for early targeted management.

Elevated Lp(a) is a significant genetic risk factor for premature ASCVD, and universal testing could enable earlier, targeted prevention strategies.

JUL 2016RodríguezJournal of the American College of Cardiology

ESC NSTE-ACS guidelines prefer rapid rule-out, prasugrel, ticagrelor, fondaparinux, and radial access over AHA/ACC.

This review provides a comparative analysis of the AHA/ACC and ESC guidelines for NSTE-ACS, highlighting key differences in diagnostic protocols, anticoagulation, and arterial access.

Stroke Mortality in the United States, 1970 to 2023

Long-term trends in stroke mortality reveal significant declines, highlighting the need for continued public health efforts.

JUL 27RodríguezCirculation

Opportunistic coronary artery calcium screening is advocated to improve cardiovascular risk prediction and overcome the costs and limited adoption of dedicated ECG-gated chest CTs.

Opportunistic coronary artery calcium screening may help overcome the limitations and costs associated with dedicated ECG-gated chest CTs for cardiovascular risk prediction.

Telemedicine for new cardiology visits is linked to ~83% higher odds of expanding geographic reach.

Telemedicine may expand geographic access and shorten wait times for new cardiology patients; leaves open whether prospective trials confirm these observational associations.

Incidental coronary artery calcium score ≥100 detected on routine non-ECG-gated CTs was associated with an increased risk of all-cause death compared with a score of 0 (HR 1.51; 95% CI 1.28-1.79).

Incidental coronary artery calcium quantified by a deep-learning algorithm on routine non-ECG-gated CTs identifies patients at increased risk of death and cardiovascular events, offering an opportunity for opportunistic screening.

JUN 1NdumeleJournal of the American College of Cardiology

2026 AHA/ACC/ADA/ASN Guideline for the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Management of Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic Syndrome

Standardizes CKM syndrome care for clinicians; extends 2013 obesity guidance into unified cardio-kidney-metabolic prevention and management.

Patient Experiences With GLP-1 Receptor Agonists

Qualitative study explores patient experiences with GLP-1 receptor agonists, highlighting benefits, challenges, and support needs.

MAY 28MantenaStanford University

Grounding Language Models in Behavioral Science to Scale Physical Activity Interventions for Hispanic/Latinx Populations

Objective: Hispanic/Latinx populations in the U.S. experience higher rates of chronic disease linked to physical inactivity, yet digital health interventions remain largely inaccessible to more than 16 million Hispanic/Latinx adults with limited English proficiency. While large language models (LLMs) offer scalable personalization, their use in non-English behavioral coaching is unexplored. This study introduces MHC-Coach-ES, a Spanish-language LLM fine-tuned on the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of behavior change. Materials and Methods: We fine-tuned Llama 3-70B-Instruct using a two-stage pipeline. First, the model was adapted to Spanish health and motivational language using a 2.21-million-token corpus. Second, it was instruction-tuned on 3,268 translated human written messages to align the model with the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of Behavioral Change. We compared MHC-Coach-ES with Llama 3-70B-Instruct and translated human-expert messages using a forced-choice preference survey (N = 77) and blinded expert review (N = 2). Linguistic analysis showed that MHC-Coach-ES produced more temporally anchored messages than the base model (65% vs. 20%), while maintaining readability. In blinded evaluation, clinical experts rated MHC-Coach-ES higher for alignment with Transtheoretical Model stages than human-expert messages (4.83 vs. 4.38 out of 5). The base model also outperformed translated expert messages across preference and expert ratings. Conclusions: Generative AI can operationalize behavioral science frameworks in Spanish, offering a scalable approach to reducing health disparities. The strong performance of both MHC-Coach-ES and the base model highlights the promise of generative and personalized approaches over translation-based localization for theory-driven behavioral interventions.

JUL 2023ViraniJournal of the American College of Cardiology

2023 AHA/ACC/ACCP/ASPC/NLA/PCNA Guideline for the Management of Patients With Chronic Coronary Disease

Opens anti-inflammatory axis for chronic coronary disease; extends secondary prevention beyond lipids and antithrombotics.[[1]](https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2025/04/07/11/00/the-evolving-role-of-colchicine-in-coronary-atherosclerosis-management)[[2]](https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2023.05.