“Now that there are so many different choices in treatment, I think it’s becoming exponentially harder for the practitioner to decide what to do. They need guidance, and we hope Cardiovascular Therapeutics can help.” – Dr. Marc Sabatine
I think about having benefited from excellent training, about how much I valued great textbooks, and about the effort that people put in to creating those resources that I still use in my clinical practice as I encounter uncommon scenarios, and I want to pay that back. One way that I can pay it back is to work on a resource that is useful for trainees and practitioners so that the latest and greatest information is available to them. I think teaching can take on a variety of forms — it can be teaching at the bedside for a particular patient; it can be lecturing to a group of fellows; it can be lecturing to the medical house staff at a hospital; but it can also be preparing, developing and delivering a textbook that can be used globally. That’s the reward.
There is a continued explosion of information and new data in cardiology that really covers the whole gamut. It is advancing our understanding of the basic processes that ultimately lead to the clinical manifestations of diseases. There are so many changes in new therapeutics, including pharmacologic therapy and device therapy, that I can never just use the same talk year to year when lecturing to the house staff and fellows. The whole field is always changing, so it creates a need for practitioners to always try to stay up-to-date on all of these advances and to put them in context. Now that there are so many different choices in treatment, I think it’s becoming exponentially harder for the practitioner to decide what to do. They need guidance, and we hope Cardiovascular Therapeutics can help.
We thought very carefully about what to add to the book because there is so much new information out there. Part of how we thought about what to add was structural: making sure we did full justice to the vascular part of cardiovascular and the venous side of thromboembolism. We also added sections on peripheral arterial disease, cerebrovascular disease, and aortic disease. We revamped existing chapters to take into account all the advances. In addition, the pharmacotherapy and pharmacogenetics continue to evolve very rapidly, and so we are really trying to get the message out of how we can personalize therapy for individuals, be it based on clinical factors, biomarkers, or genetic variance. There are also cutting-edge therapies — stem cell therapy, for example, where there’s been a lot of discussion and many new trials coming out. Device therapy is changing, too, as devices become more sophisticated. It’s no longer pacemakers and stents. Now we need to consider trans-catheter aortic valve implantation, percutaneous ventricular assist devices, and biventricular pacing, all of which we’ve put into this new edition.
Marc Sabatine, MD is chairman of the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction Study Group, an associate physician in Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a pioneer in the research and treatment of cardiovascular disease, and is an author of the fourth edition of Cardiovascular Therapeutics: A Companion to Braunwald’s Heart Disease.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Sabatine also holds a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed an internal medicine residency and cardiology clinical fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a research fellowship at TIMI. Today, he is a researcher who focuses on optimal treatment of patients with acute coronary syndromes, and he is an author of more than 100 original research articles. He has been acknowledged for his work with the American College of Cardiology Zipes Distinguished Young Scientist Award.
Related Authors: Elliot M. Antman, MD
