National Cardiac Societies document reviewers: listed in Addenda. No commercial use is authorized. Permission can be obtained upon submission of a written request to Oxford University Press, the publisher of the European Heart Journal and the party authorized to handle such permissions on behalf of the ESC.
Disclaimer The ESC Guidelines represent the views of the ESC and were produced after careful consideration of the scientific and medical knowledge and the evidence available at the time of their dating. The disclosure forms of the authors and reviewers are available on the ESC website www. Guidelines summarize and evaluate all available evidence, at the time of the writing process, on a particular issue with the aim of assisting health professionals in selecting the best management strategies for an individual patient with a given condition, taking into account the impact on outcome, as well as the risk-benefit ratio of particular diagnostic or therapeutic means.
Guidelines and recommendations should help health professionals to make decisions in their daily practice; however, the final decisions concerning an individual patient must be made by the responsible health professional s , in consultation with the patient and caregiver as appropriate. Because of their impact on clinical practice, quality criteria for the development of guidelines have been established in order to make all decisions transparent to the user.
Selected experts in the field undertook a comprehensive review of the published evidence for management including diagnosis, treatment, prevention and rehabilitation of a given condition, according to the ESC Committee for Practice Guidelines CPG and EACTS Guidelines Committee policy. A critical evaluation of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures was performed, including assessment of the risk-benefit ratio. Estimates of expected health outcomes for larger populations were included, where data exist.
The level of evidence and the strength of recommendation of particular management options were weighed and graded according to pre-defined scales, as outlined in Tables 1 and 2. The Committee is also responsible for the endorsement process of these guidelines.
