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AHA president: Threats to CV health increasing, engagement required
ANAHEIM, Calif. — While advances in research have led the cardiology community to a much greater understanding of how to treat heart disease, the threats of obesity, diabetes, uncontrolled hypertension and physical inactivity are muting gains in prevention, American Heart Association President John J. Warner, MD, FAHA, said during his opening address.
The cardiology community must engage with the public and other stakeholders to more strongly reduce CV events and morbidities, according to Warner, who holds the Nancy and Jeremy Halbreich and Theodore Strauss Professorship in Cardiology and the Jim and Norma Smith Distinguished Chair for Interventional Cardiology at UT Southwestern University Hospitals, where he is also chief executive officer.
“On one hand, the future has never been brighter,” Warner said. “New research areas like applied genomics and systems biology are expanding our understanding of disease and providing unprecedented opportunities to sort out the data from decades of large clinical trials, longitudinal cohorts and new studies into meaningful subsets so we can understand more about our individual patients and to treat them more effectively.
“On the other hand, our work is occurring against a sobering backdrop,” he said. “Our remarkable progress in reducing mortality from heart disease and stroke over many decades is slowing, and may even be reversing. We’re beginning to see firsthand that the global epidemic of obesity, sedentary behavior and poor diets, and their effects on the prevalence of diabetes and hypertension are changing the landscape of cardiovascular risk. This increase in risk has the potential to disproportionately affect the lives of the most vulnerable, and those whose cardiovascular risk we understand the least or have paid the least attention to.”
While the picture may be grim, “we are all here today because of our commitment to improving this picture, and focusing our resolve on advancing clinical care and advocating for improvements in the health of all communities,” Warner said.
Key will be engagement with the public, politicians and others, he said, noting that willingness to engage in the public sphere has enabled positive measures like bans on smoking in public places.
Population health, defined as “caring for people, not just trying to fix their problems,” is “where I think each of us individually, and the AHA collectively, have our biggest opportunities,” Warner said. “As the business models of health care evolve toward rewarding the quality of care we are providing as opposed to the quantity of work that we are doing, more and more of our successes will be defined by the diseases we prevent rather than by the diseases we treat.”
To maximize impact, “our research platforms must change as well, involving more patients and examining their problems in different ways,” he said. Such examples include the AHA’s Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine and One Brave Idea initiative.
“My hope is to challenge you to expand your influence, to amplify the work that you do so that it affects more people,” he said. – by Erik Swain
Reference:
Warner JJ. Opening Session. Presented at: American Heart Association Scientific Sessions; Nov. 11-15, 2017; Anaheim, California.
Disclosure: Warner reports no relevant financial disclosures.