Duke Cardiology news, updates, reflections and accolades
American Heart Association Meeting
The American Heart Association meeting began this weekend in New Orleans with a large presence from Duke. The opening session was notable for a speech from president of the AHA (Steven Houser) on his personal story and commitment to research. There were also numerous awards given including the Research Achievement Award given by the AHA to Robert Califf, MD, current commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Dr. Califf also gave the memorial Connor Lecture to the opening sessions. This lecture is in honor of Lewis Connor, the first president of the AHA. Dr. Califf spoke on ‘Revolutionizing Cardiovascular Medicine through Information Sharing to Achieve Better Outcomes.’ This broad ranging talk included themes on changing our daily practice to capture information and the concept that that health systems as nodes will exist to share data back to patients and systems in order to gain better understanding of how we practice. Additionally, the AHA announced several new initiatives including a partnership with Amazon Web Services around data sharing. This new initiative had 5 institutions that committed support and partnership. The Duke Clinical Research Institute under Eric Peterson’s leadership has committed to this initiative as a founding group.
Duke Heart scientific footprint at AHA
The Duke group was able to have more than 200 presentations at the AHA 2016 meeting with several associated late breaking clinical trials (5 out of the 21) and publications in high tier journals. In addition we also had Carmelo Milano and Chet Patel involved in the recently published Momentum 3 trial evaluating a fully magnetic levitated centrifugal flow pump compared to the axial flow pump.
Our DCRI vascular group also had the pleasure of working with a large group of investigators to evaluate ticagrelor compared to clopidogrel in patients with PAD. This study, the EUCLID, trial did not show a difference in the two therapies for PAD and will provide us with many lessons in how to manage PAD patients for years to come.
On the last day of the meeting our heart failure group had several important studies including - IRONOUT HF, which found limited impact of oral iron supplementation on functional capacity in chronic HF patients, and Athena HF, which found that routine use of spironolactone in acute HF patients, was not warranted.
Duke University Cooperative Cardiovascular Society (DUCCS)
The DUCCS group had a great dinner and event at AHA with our Fellows and past graduates. At this event DUCCS members sponsor a current fellow to come to dinner and hear about Cardiology practice and times at Duke. The DUCCS group is always accepting members and plays a large role in forming, leading, and enrolling in ongoing studies.
News and updates from the week in Duke Cardiology:
- Rob Lewis kicked off the 5th lead management training program at Duke. The course this week included simulation training, 3 live cases, and 5 didactic lectures. This is a great accomplishment by the EP group and is part of the lifelong learning mission.
- We had several visitors from Sing Health and Duke NUS Medical School this week to Duke Heart. We shared best practices and places where we intend to collaborate in the upcoming future.
- The School of Medicine Office of Faculty Development is seeking applications for the ALICE program, a 10-month career development program for mid-career women faculty that is essentially a local version of ELAM. Several members of the Dept participated in the pilot run and had very positive experiences (see this post) There is a $2,250 for program expenses including the cost of the personality and 360 instruments, speaker fees, facility costs, and program evaluation. I strongly believe that this is a very worthwhile investment in faculty leadership development and will discuss with any interest faculty member to help cover costs and encourage participation.