HJBR Jul/Aug 2019

Healthcare Journal of baton rouge I  JUL / AUG 2019 17 with a risk of dying of a heart attack greater than someone who has experienced a heart attack. Editor  Why did you create the New Cardio- vascular Horizons Conference? How impor- tant is it to bring other disciplines into the vascular discussion? Walker  NCVH was one of the very first multi-disciplinary meetings anywhere. We were doing a lot of work saving legs in patients presenting with ischemic limb dis- ease. It became very obvious to me that by simply making the diagnosis and treating themmedically, much less interventionally, we could not only affect the likelihood of saving their legs, but also affect the likeli- hood of themnot dying. Nowwhat do I mean by that? Sick legs are almost never attached to healthy people. Historically, people have treated a sick leg as a sick leg, forgetting that it was attached to an unhealthy per- son. Therefore, theymay have gotten a good leg outcome, only to have the patient die of a heart attack or a stroke because a patient with a new diagnosis of peripheral arterial disease is more likely to die of a heart attack than a heart attack survivor. Now I can’t put my finger on the pulse of the heart arteries because it’s inside the chest, but I can check for foot pulses, and if they’re not there, I’ve identified a high risk patient for death and also for morbidity, or problems such as heart attacks or strokes that may not kill them. We really wanted to share this story with “NCVH was one of the very first multi-disciplinary meetings anywhere. We were doing a lot of work saving legs in patients presenting with ischemic limb disease.” others because we believe that via periph- eral vascular mechanisms, by whichwe treat the whole patient globally, and by aggres- sively identifying peripheral arterial disease, we can do somuchmore than just improve the outcome of the limbs. We now know that we can decrease mortality and morbidity. We want to get this knowledge out to other healthcare providers to look for this as well. It is really important, and so we aimed this at many people—nurse practitioners, family doctors, internists, podiatrists, wound heal- ing centers, nephrologists—because they see such a high incidence of peripheral vascular disease, and also vascular surgeons, other cardiologists, radiologists, and the public, because many people in the public, par- ticularly women, think they don’t have any real risk of peripheral vascular disease. Yet more women in the last decade in the United States have died of heart attacks than men. More women have had amputations than men for ischemic disease. Yet it’s nowhere on their agenda, and so we’ve really tried to reach every group that provides medical care, including OBGYNs, who follow many of these women as their primary care pro- viders, to simply look for this problem such that appropriate treatments can be instituted earlier.The first most appropriate treatments weren’t anything aggressive at all. They’re perhaps a baby aspirin a day, lowering your cholesterol, lowering your blood pressure, keeping your weight at an ideal level, per- forming routine exercises, not smoking—all of these things that we all know we should “We’ve tried to serve as mentors to those coming up in the field, and we’ve tried to create forums such as NCVH where information can be shared and people can improve what they do.”