Author: Liz Torrey

VCU Health Pauley Heart Center is Virginia’s top heart hospital. Pauley’s mission to improve cardiovascular care and reduce health disparities for all people is supported by his three pillars of clinical care, education, and research, and he is currently hiring people specializing in form. We are focused on expanding our team of distinguished research clinicians. Heart disease frequently affects Virginians.

Pauley Heart Center Director Greg Hundley, M.D., recently shared details about his vision for expanding VCU Health’s cardiovascular research workforce and how expanding Central Virginia’s research infrastructure will benefit residents.

VCU Health Pauley Heart Center is seeking support from the state of Virginia to hire a new cardiovascular research leader. Why does Pauly need to expand his research team at this time?

One-third of cardiologists currently working in Virginia are 65 years of age or older. This is very scary. Add to that the fact that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in Virginia and across the nation. Additionally, the population of Americans 65 and older, the age group that most frequently experiences heart disease, is projected to nearly double from about 40 million to 80 million over the next 15 years. All of this will combine to strain every hospital system in the country.

We won’t have enough doctors to care for the people who need care, we don’t.

VCU Health is an academic medical center. What sets academic medical centers apart from other hospitals is that our physicians and surgeons are also researchers and teachers. They are physicians and scientists, and the care they provide is based on the latest innovations and research in their fields. What does that mean for the average patient? Well, patients treated at academic medical centers have a 20% higher chance of survival than patients treated at non-teaching hospitals, no matter the condition or procedure.

One of the things we’re trying to do is increase our faculty to support the training of additional physicians. A facility the size of VCU would need to train 8 to 14 cardiologists per year. We only train six people because we don’t have enough faculty to enroll additional cardiology fellows.

The second thing we’re trying to do is hire experts in specific areas of cardiovascular medicine. Cardiovascular disease is extremely widespread. About half of the spectrum is called ischemic heart disease, which is a disease in which arteries become clogged. The remaining part of the spectrum can be divided into several smaller parts. [heart] A complex and specific disease process. You need a specialist who not only understands the ins and outs of cardiovascular health, but also focuses specifically on one of those areas.

What “piece of the pie” most needs additional research and why?

First, we need researchers focused on women’s health.

I often think of every blood vessel in my body as a road. Let’s say your aorta (the large blood vessel that carries blood away from your heart and distributes it throughout your body) is Interstate 95. Arteries leave this interstate and go to specific organs or different parts of the organ, such as the liver or kidneys. Body – These arteries are like his four lane roads, for example Route 360 ​​and Broad Street. But where are most of the roads in Virginia? They’re in your neighborhood, right? Every country road, neighborhood street, these blood vessels are microcirculation.

For some reason, heart disease in men tends to affect the four-lane road of the body, causing the “chest pain and shortness of breath” complex symptoms that are advertised on TV. — Well, you must be having a heart attack.

Women, on the other hand, are more prone to disease processes that affect small blood vessels and have a different complex of symptoms. It may mimic symptoms such as an upset stomach. If you don’t listen and understand the symptoms and triggers that are occurring, you won’t be able to diagnose the woman correctly and she may suffer greatly.

We also need researchers focused on hypertension. In some areas around this hospital, 3 out of 4 people have high blood pressure. We lack that awareness, so we need to think of new ways to address it and provide blood pressure medications to those who need them. We are very interested in working with the Department of Nephrology to establish a hypertension center here at his VCU. There is much that needs to be investigated in the cardiorenal management of blood pressure.

We also need researchers focused on cardio-oncology. Currently, patients undergoing cancer treatment develop heart disease as a result of their treatment. We attack cancer by cutting off the cancer’s blood supply or interfering with its metabolism, but many cancer drugs cannot tell the difference between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue. . What is the most metabolically active organ in your body? It’s your mind.So it stands to reason that when you try to attack cancer with different treatments, you end up damaging other areas. [of the body]. How the heart and vascular system are protected also depends on the type of cancer treatment used.

It also requires procedural expertise on the “big highways” or arteries. There are many disease processes that affect the aorta. We are also learning that the aorta controls and influences many other systems in the body, delivering hormones and nutrients to other parts of the body. Surgical procedures are the main treatment for aortic disease, but there are only 96 treatments for thoracic disease.[chest] We have surgeons throughout the state, and cardiac surgery is just one subspecialty of thoracic surgery. Only three cardiothoracic surgeons are trained each year in the current fellowship program. We need to hire a new heart surgeon in Virginia to ensure our patients receive help when they need it most.

Finally, researchers are needed to study disease processes related to congenital heart disease, inflammation, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and certain forms of heart failure.

Why does Virginia need to increase its cardiovascular research workforce specifically?Aren’t these areas of research theoretically possible to promote in any state or city?

VCU Health serves a more diverse patient population than most other academic medical institutions in the country, and these disease processes occur at significantly higher rates in this population. Community-based research plays an important role in improving access to care and addressing the “why” of certain problems. This is only possible when we have a genuine connection to the needs of the communities we serve.

Increasing opportunities for patients to participate in community-based clinical research will also help reduce some of the bias that currently exists in cardiovascular clinical trial results. His VCU Medical Center in Richmond is the fourth referral center. This means that the most medically complex patients come to us from hospitals across Virginia. We are the state’s flagship hospital, caring for the sickest people.

We are recruiting researchers in the above areas who can perform preclinical science to discover solutions, test therapeutic interventions in clinical trials, and accelerate and implement cutting-edge treatments that already exist. Masu. All of these forms of expertise are needed in Central Virginia. Having established research teams in specific areas of expertise means that Virginians have a high level of access to the latest and most promising heart health treatments. We already have a great team at the Pauley Heart Center, but we need to expand our team in these focus areas to best serve our aging patient population. Read more stories about heart health on the VCU Health Pauley Heart Center Blog.

Read more stories about heart health on the VCU Health Pauley Heart Center Blog.