Post-truth era and cardiology: After ORBITA, before CABANA

Abstract

The evidence-based medicine is rooted in the scientific truth. Oxford Dictionaries has released its 2016 word of the year: "Post-truth," which they define as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". In everything from climate change denial to the anti-vaccine movement, we're seeing the consequences of a failure to engage with scientific evidence. Fake news and post-truth pronouncements are increasingly common in social media and political era and are unfortunately also progressively being applied to the medical science. We also see some evidence of post-truth signals in daily cardiology procedures and guidelines including both interventional cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology. Guideline recommendations made before the randomized-controlled trials (RCT) are published might result in a scenario that the interventions or procedures have been performed on millions of people, costing billions of dollars, leading to unnecessary use of health care resources and often, ending up being even accepted as routine procedures in certain clinical situations. "Justice delayed is justice denied" is a legal cliché meaning that if timely justice is not provided to the sufferer, it loses it importance and violates human rights. In medicine, "The RCT delayed is justice denied", as highlighted by ORBITA (Objective Randomised Blinded Investigation with optimal medical Therapy of Angioplasty in stable angina) trial and as may happen with CABANA (Catheter Ablation versus Anti-arrhythmic Drug Therapy for Atrial Fibrillation Trial) in the post-truth era.

Keywords: CABANA trial; Cardiology; Evidence-based medicine; ORBITA trial; Post-truth era.