The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association offers ten stories featuring the top advances in heart disease and stroke research in 2014.  Failure of renal denervation and ability of bariatric surgery to control blood sugar top the list. Each story was selected by a panel of the association's science staff and volunteers. The organization has compiled an annual list of the major advances in heart disease and stroke research each year since 1996.

Bariatric surgery improved blood sugar control, reduced the need for medications and improved the quality of life for obese patients with Type 2 diabetes, according to a three-year follow-up study published on March 31 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). 

Also in NEJM, renal denervation was shown to be no better than sham at lowering resistant high blood pressure, despite showing early promise for high blood pressure patients who don't respond to multiple medications.

A new, large-scale study from Japan showed that people over 60 with atherosclerosis risk factors who took daily aspirin did not have a lower risk of myocardial infarction, stroke or cardiovascular death compared to people not taking aspirin.  Daily aspirin also increased bleeding risks in this population.  The study was published in JAMA.

A single injection could eliminate a lifetime of high cholesterol, if humans respond to it as dramatically as mice did in a study published in Circulation Research. Researchers lowered cholesterol by 35 percent to 40 percent in mice, just days after delivering a treatment that increased the liver's ability to remove LDL cholesterol from the body.

A study in Circulation found that a new, highly sensitive blood test finds early heart damage that may go undetected in diabetics. The finding may lead to earlier monitoring of people with diabetes and more aggressive early treatment. 

A new experimental drug has the potential to help many heart failure patients live longer, better lives, according to research published in 2014. Researchers found the experimental drug LCZ696 lowered deaths from cardiovascular disease compared to the existing heart failure drug, enalapril.  They published their results in NEJM.

Balancing the risk of bleeding with the need to prevent myocardial infarction, blood clots and plaque build-up in coronary stents has challenged medical experts for years, but this study found extending the amount of time people take a combination of two anti-clotting medications (aspirin and either clopidogrel or prasugrel) could give prevention efforts a major boost.  Results from the Dual Antiplatelet Therapy (DAPT) study were published in NEJM and Lancet.
Two studies in JAMA and JAMA Neurology showed that collaborative pre-hospital and hospital systems speed treatment and benefit stroke patients. Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is the only approved treatment for patients with ischemic stroke, but it must be given within a few hours. These two studies highlighted systems that helped emergency medical systems and hospitals work together to speed treatment time and benefit stroke patients.

Modern methods lead to discoveries in rare heart disease and post-stent vessel damage.  Researchers pioneered a "heart on a chip" model to learn how a single mutation affects the heart cells of children with a rare disorder. Others harnessed the power of "big data" to learn how two genes influenced blood vessels after stenting. Both led to the use of promising experimental treatments that may one day change how these diseases are treated.  The research was published in Nature Medicine and Journal of Clinical Investigation.

And finally, when put to the test, two types of drugs (losartan, an angiotensin receptor blocker and atenolol, a beta blocker) are generally equally matched for treating Marfan syndrome, giving doctors new information for treating the genetic disorder that can stretch and weaken the aorta.  The study was published in the NEJM.