As a current Internal Medicine resident and one of the youngest members of this year’s class of AHA Early Career Bloggers, my #AHA20 experience was equal parts thrilling, educational, and overwhelming. This was my first time attending the AHA Scientific Sessions and my second virtual conference experience after this year’s QCOR 2020 Scientific Sessions. On … Read more
Does a polypill obviate the need for behavioral changes? Absolutely not. As a physician training in Cardiology, I spend a sizeable part of my time discussing achievable weekly nutritional goals with patients in addition to stressing the importance of medication adherence. I ask myself after watching the “Bending the Curve for CV Disease- Precision or … Read more
I am pleased to have the opportunity to summarize an important recent paper on the use of sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors by Drs. Muthiah Vaduganathan, Gregg Fonarow, and colleagues in JAMA Cardiology,1 that was published simultaneously with AHA20. Background: SGLT2 inhibitors are a class of medications that were initially developed for management of diabetes … Read more
As many of us know and have experienced by now, the 2020 global pandemic has forced most conferences to cancel, postpone, or alter their planned in-person settings. For meetings that opted to switch these important gatherings to a brand new all-virtual format, many challenges were faced, but also new opportunities to re-invent the conference experience … Read more
The American Heart Association (AHA) COVID-19 registry, leveraging the existing AHA Get With The Guideline (GWTG) platform, was developed to better understand hospital outcomes and adverse cardiovascular complications for patients with COVID-19. The registry was formulated to accelerate the pace of COVID-19 research and quality improvement, where granular data were collected and analyzed at an … Read more
Over the past years, series of clinical trials prove the beneficial effect of glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors in reducing the risk of cardiovascular events in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The results from these trials were consistent, significant, and demonstrated a considerable reduction in heart failure hospitalization among patients who used SGLT2 inhibitors, … Read more
I spent the finale of #AHA20 Tuesday evening at the “What You Need to Know for a Career in Preventive Cardiology” fireside chat hosted by the lovely Dr. Anum Saeed with experts Drs. Ann Marie Navar, Andrew DeFillips, Seth Martin, Michael Shapiro, and Martha Gulati. The panel discussed the following topics: Exploring the field of … Read more
The last day of the amazing #AHA20 featured a series of COVID-19-related research presentations. First, data from the AHA COVID-19 Registry, a large database collecting data about COVID-19 patients and outcomes around the country, were shared. The registry includes data from 109 hospitals and over 22,500 records of patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19. Notably, … Read more
In the scientific session titled “Beyond Biomarkers: Inflammation and CVD across the Translational Spectrum”, inflammation was the topic of interest. It is important to note that inflammation has been established as a focus for the development of complications for cardiovascular diseases for some time now. The changes in inflammatory markers have been shown to be … Read more
The types of annual society meetings are as diverse as there are professional societies worldwide. Some medical, scientific, and academic societies are made up of extremely specialized sub-subfields. While other professional societies cast a wide net, bringing in members from different specialties that share some but not a lot of similarities. And of course, there … Read more