[NOVELTIES IN PERICARDIAL DISEASES: A FOCUSED REVIEW OF THE LATEST EUROPEAN GUIDELINES].

More than a decade has elapsed since the first international guidelines on the diagnosis and management of pericardial diseases were issued by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in 2004. Since then, significant advances have been made in this field due to several randomized double blinded controlled trials and also retrospective, as well as prospective, cohort studies that were conducted during this time frame. However, despite the amount of knowledge that has been accumulated, only Spanish and Brazilian national societies of cardiology have so far published national guidelines on the management of pericardial diseases. No official guidelines were issued by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association. Therefore, a demand for an updated document has become inevitable in order to summarize all new data and translate them into a set of recommendations which could be implemented in clinical practice. For this purpose, the new guidelines, focused on the clinical management of patients with pericardial diseases were issued by the ESC in 2015. The full text of the 2015 guidelines reflects the progress that has been made so far: the manuscript contains 9 sections (excluding appendix and references), nearly 30 second-level subsections and covers 44 pages. Several new chapters are introduced for the first time in the current guidelines, as compared with the previous version. Therefore, the aim of this review is to summarize and emphasize the most clinically relevant new aspects of the current guidelines as compared with its previous version published in 2004.