“Cardiovascular disease risks start so early. We want to get the best information out to the individuals who take care of people at risk.” – Dr. JoAnne Foody
Preventive Cardiology is quite user-friendly and relevant to just about anyone who practices medicine and treats patients with risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Too often we pigeonhole this kind of information to cardiologists but we need to get this information out to primary care providers, internists, even obstetricians-gynecologists who provide the bulk of primary care for women. Cardiovascular disease risks start so early. We want to get the best information out to the individuals who take care of people at risk. So again, the book is relevant to just about anyone in the practice of health care.
For clinicians who read the book, we purposefully included a lot on quality of care and performance measures and how to achieve best practice when it comes to prevention. We cover the gamut from basic research to the best clinical practice imaging modalities all the way through to implementation. While the prevention tactics in the book are organized alphabetically from A to F, I think the book covers preventive cardiology from A to Z.
I was inspired to go into medicine by my parents. My father is a gastroenterologist and encouraged me to pursue medicine. My mother is a pharmacist, so my family is science-oriented. We also unfortunately have heart disease in our family. I have lost many of my grandparents and relatives to heart disease. When I looked for a career path, medicine was certainly in the cards. I wanted to work to prevent heart disease. I did a training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in primary care medicine before pursuing cardiovascular medicine because I always recognized the importance of focusing on primary prevention and the prevention of heart disease.
JoAnne M. Foody, MD, FACC, FAHA, is director of the Cardiovascular Wellness Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the identification and use of clinical strategies that prevent adverse cardiovascular events in those with and without coronary artery disease. She is an author of Preventive Cardiology: Companion to Braunwald’s Heart Disease.
Dr. Foody has had leadership roles on the National AMI and National Heart Failure projects of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. She holds a medical degree from the Medical School of the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine. Dr. Foody completed residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
Related Authors: Roger Blumenthal, MD, FACC, FAHA; Nathan D. Wong, PhD, FACC, FAHA
