ABC | Volume 112, Nº2, February 2019

Review Article The Year in Cardiology 2018: ABC Cardiol and RPC at a glance Ricardo Fontes-Carvalho, 1,2 Glaucia Maria Moraes de Oliveira, 3,4 Lino Gonçalves, 5,6 Carlos Eduardo Rochitte 7,8 Departamento de Cardiologia – Centro Hospitalar de Vila Nova de Gaia, 1 Vila Nova de Gaia – Portugal Departamento de Cirurgia e Fisiologia – Faculdade de Medicina – Universidade do Porto, 2 Porto – Portugal Faculdade de Medicina – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 3 Rio de Janeiro, RJ – Brazil Instituto do Coração Edson Saad – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 4 Rio de Janeiro, RJ – Brazil Departamento de Cardiologia – Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra, 5 Coimbra – Portugal Faculdade de Medicina – Universidade de Coimbra, 6 Coimbra – Portugal Instituto do Coração (InCor) – Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo, 7 São Paulo, SP – Brazil Hospital do Coração (HCOR), 8 São Paulo, SP – Brazil Keywords Periodicals/trends; Scientific and Technical Activities/trends; Cardiovascular Diseases/prevention and control; Cardiovascular Diseases/epidemiology; Cardiomyopathies; Heart ValveDiseases. Mailing Address: Gláucia Maria Moraes de Oliveira Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – R. Prof. Rodolpho P. Rocco, 255 – 8°. Andar – Sala 6, UFRJ. Postal Code 21941-913, Cidade Universitária, RJ – Brazil E-mail: glauciam@cardiol.br , glauciamoraesoliveira@gmail.com Manuscript received December 11, 2018, revised manuscript December 14, 2018, accepted December 18, 2018 DOI: 10.5935/abc.20190015 Portuguese is the sixth most spoken language worldwide, by 244 million speakers, the fifth most commonly used language over the Internet, by almost 83 million cybernauts, and the third most commonly used language in the social media Facebook and Twitter . Portuguese is the official language of eight countries (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, and Timor-Leste). Despite the incorporation of native words, and the grammatical and pronunciation changes characteristic of each country, their languages remain united and they share many important health problems such as cardiovascular diseases (CVD). 1 Currently, two journals are published in the Portuguese language all over the world, Revista Portuguesa de Cardiologia (Rev Port Cardiol) and Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia (currently nicknamed ABC Cardiol), and both published the best papers in the Portuguese language. Rev Port Cardiol, also known as Portuguese Journal of Cardiology, is the official scientific journal of the Portuguese Society of Cardiology. With more than 35 years of uninterrupted scientific activity, it is now a prestigious international journal with global visibility. 2 The histories of the Brazilian Society of Cardiology and ABC Cardiol have been completely interlaced since the beginning, and in 2018 ABC Cardiol completed 70 years of existence. ABC Cardiol is an open access publication, scientific home, reading for all the 14,000 cardiologists and members of the Brazilian Society of Cardiology, with almost one third of its articles coming from international authors. ABC Cardiol is indexed in themain databases and has the best Impact Factor for journals in the area of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Sciences in Latin America. 3 Every year both journals publish dozens of high-quality scientific articles. In the year 2018, Revista Portuguesa de Cardiologia has published a total of 194 papers, with 62 original articles, and ABC Cardiol published a total of 240 papers, with 96 being original articles. The selection of the 10 best research papers (Tables 1 and 2) from both journals is always a difficult endeavor, given their overall high scientific quality. Moreover, in the absence of specific metrics, this selection is always imperfect and influenced by some degree of subjectivity. Nonetheless, a judging committee composed by highly selected scientists in the field brings us probably the fairest results for the top ten articles in these Journals. Both journals have also published several important review papers, which were out of the scope of this selection. Coronary artery disease In 2018, Rev Port Cardiol reported the 15-year results of the Portuguese Registry of Acute Coronary Syndromes (PorACS). 4 This is a multi-center, continuous, and ongoing registry which has already involved more than 45,000 events, from 45 centers. It is one of the largest national registries in this field, which is only exceeded by the SWEDEHEART 5 and the MINAP 6 registries. This article provides very important information about the epidemiology and evolution of ACS treatment. First, it demonstrates that the clinical profile of ACS patients changed little over the years, and the proportion of ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) remained stable (45%). More importantly, over the years, there has been a major improvement in the overall quality of ACS care. For example, more than 85% of STEMI patients in Portugal now receive reperfusion therapy, which is mainly performed by primary PCI (only 5.2% underwent thrombolysis). This improvement in ACS care led to a remarkable reduction of in-hospital mortality, which decreased from 6.7% in 2002 to 2.5% in 2016. Therefore, the cardiovascular communitymust be acknowledged for this striking achievement. Nevertheless, the work is not finished, and this study also shows important gaps in ACS care that should be addressed. Unfortunately, time-to-reperfusion has not improved sufficiently, and there is an urgent need to improve both the “patient-delay” and “system-delay” times. Inanother interesting articlepublished in2018, PereiraH. et al. 7 evaluated the determinants of this “patient‑delay” time in the Portuguese health system in 994 patients with suspected STEMI. Although most healthcare systems focus their performance measures in the evaluation of “door‑to‑balloon times”, 8 it is important to understand and address the reasons for this “patient‑delay time”, which means the time from symptom onset to the first medical contact. 9 The investigators observed that patient-delay time was too long (about 120 minutes) and 193