Atrial fibrillation is the second largest cardiac disease treated in the US, with nearly 2.2 million people suffering from it, and 600,000 or 700,000 diagnosed each year. As such, there is a huge market for products dealing with atrial fibrillation- a multi-billion dollar market. Anaylst Dr. Jan Wald talks a little bit about stock picks in that market:

“If we divide the market into endocardial and surgical segments, and we speak about the endocardial segment first, the two companies that have full product lines are Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and St. Jude (STJ)…I think St. Jude is probably the best positioned in the market to succeed.”

“There is a company we follow called AtriCure (ATRC), which is developing surgical ablation  tools. We think AtriCure is currently the leader in the market, the best in class.  There is another company, CryoCor (CRYO), which is using an endovascular approach, a percutaneous approach using cryoenergy, which we think is interesting.”

For the full interview with Dr. Wald, including a complete overview of the cardiac care space and more stock picks, click here.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Healthcare Stocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.