B E T H I S R A E L D E AC O N E S S M E D I C A L C E N T E R
WINTER 2017–18
Turning Data into Wisdom p. 6
Breaking the Silence p. 8
BEATING HEART DISEASE ROBERT E. GERSZTEN, M.D.
Thinking Inside the Box p. 12
Blazing a New Trail p. 14
During a typical stint in the cardiac intensive care unit, Robert E. Gerszten, M.D., will often evaluate patients experiencing their first heart attack. Many are easy to identify based on traditional risk factors of age, gender, hypertension, high cholesterol levels, or smoking history. But those aren’t the patients that keep the chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine up at night. “The problem is that if you look at the entire segment of people who develop heart disease, lots of them don’t have those risk factors,” he says of the individuals who do not show the traditional warning signs to trigger immediate life saving care. “We need to uncover better risk factors, and we need to understand the biology much better.” Gerszten, who took the helm of the division two years ago, is a national leader in translational research to
identify new biomarkers and pathways for more accurately predicting and diagnosing heart disease in all patients and for understanding who will respond to therapies. He has focused most of his work on the relationship between cardiac and metabolic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, a field known as cardiometabolic disease. “I started off as a basic scientist working in a lab that was completely divorced from the clinical world,” he recalls. “The work certainly had clinical implications, but now we are really at a time where implementation is not way off in the future. We are talking about it daily.” The “it” they are talking about is not only diagnosing heart disease decades before patients feel the effects, but treating it as well.
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