Clinic aims to curb cardiovascular disease
New initiative at U of L works to reduce heart disease.
Drs. Sumanth Prabhu, Stephen Wagner and Ihab Hamzeh, and Deirdre Higdon, Cardiology ARNP will lead the new Preventive Cardiology Clinic
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality in the United States, yet it may also be one of the most preventable.
Accounting for more than 40 percent of the recorded deaths in the nation, cardiovascular diseases also hits the metro area and the state of Kentucky especially hard. The rate of heart disease in Louisville Metro is twice the national average, while Kentucky ranks 48th in the nation in cardiovascular health.
Looking to curb those trends, the University of Louisville Preventive Cardiology Clinic aims to reduce those numbers by providing individual assessments of cardiovascular risk and developing risk reduction strategies to help minimize a person’s future risk for cardiovascular events.
Patients are currently being recruited to the clinic from a wide spectrum of institutional and extramural sources, and will undergo comprehensive screening for cardiovascular risk factors as indicated by their medical history and clinical profile.
Patients at the clinic, headed by Drs. Sumanth Prabhu, Stephen Wagner and Ihab Hamzeh, and Deirdre Higdon, Cardiology ARNP, will undergo comprehensive screening for cardiovascular risk factors as indicated by their history and clinical profile.
Both traditional and novel risk factors will be screened and measures to diminish the cardiovascular risk will be implemented.
The venue for this weekly clinic is the Faculty Office Building (Monday) and the Ambulatory Care Building AIM clinic (Wednesday).
Ideally, the clinic will focus on primary prevention, but secondary prevention in those with known heart disease will also be addressed. The overall goals of risk intervention will be to provide, on a consultative basis, recommendations for management of blood lipids, blood pressure, and various aspects of primary and secondary prevention including weight reduction, smoking cessation, use of aspirin, etc.
The prevention clinic will work closely with the patient’s primary care physician to achieve treatment goals and targets outlined by the American Heart Association and the Advanced Treatment Panel.
In addition to the clinical effort, all patients will have the opportunity to participate in clinical research that is examining the links between environmental pollution and cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes.
The project will examine the relationship between individual biomarkers and citywide-level measures of pollution exposure and traditional cardiovascular risk factors in the hopes of identifying novel risk factors related to pollutant exposure.
This research will provide a foundation for new clinical and translational discoveries regarding the relationship between modifiable risk factors, environmental pollutants and heart disease.
Unique Features of the Preventive Cardiology Clinic
• Evaluation and treatment by recognized experts in cardiovascular prevention
• Evaluation of both traditional and novel cardiac risk factors
• Use of advanced biochemical markers of cardiac risk as clinically indicated (e.g., lipoprotein particle size)
• Use of 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring as needed
• Use of novel measures of vascular health as indicated (e.g., arterial stiffness, central blood pressure measurement, coronary calcium, carotid intimal-medial thickness)
