Speakers
Prof. Salim VIRANI
Professor of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, United States
Chair, Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease Council, American College of Cardiology
Salim S. Virani, MD, Ph.D., is a tenured Professor in the Sections of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Research at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He is also an investigator in the Health Policy, Quality, and Informatics Program at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Innovation in Houston, TX. He earned his medical degree from the Aga Khan University Medical College in Pakistan, graduating with the Best Medical Graduate Award. Dr. Virani completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Miami, there receiving an award as the Best Resident. He then completed a Cardiology fellowship at the Texas Heart Institute, where he served as the Chief Cardiology Fellow and received Tauber Award for the Outstanding Graduating Fellow. His clinical practice includes being a Preventive Cardiologist at Baylor College of Medicine and the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center (MEDVAMC), with a special emphasis on management of complex dyslipidemias. He also serves as the Director for the Cardiovascular Disease Fellowship Training Program at Baylor College of Medicine and Co-Director for the VA Advanced Fellowship Program in Health Services Research & Development at MEDVAMC.
Dr. Virani’s research portfolio aims to understand the pathophysiology and epidemiology of atherosclerosis with a special emphasis on South Asians. His team is also studying several domains in the delivery of high-quality primary and secondary cardiovascular disease preventive care. Via funded research grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs, American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, NIH, AHRQ, and the World Heart Federation, his team is evaluating models of delivery of cardiovascular disease preventive care, how to leverage machine learning while using “big data”, and how point-of-care informatics driven interventions can improve guideline-concordant care delivery. His team is also evaluating how best to leverage technology to deliver high-quality care in Low-Middle Income Countries especially in South Asia. He has authored or co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications or book chapters (several with his mentees) related to various aspects of cardiovascular disease prevention including cholesterol, blood pressure control and aspirin therapy with several in high-impact journals such as Circulation, European Heart Journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Cardiology, and Journal of the American College of Cardiology. This work has received >40,000 citations. He has also served as a faculty for >50 online literary educational and self-assessment programs and has participated in >100 online or in person media interviews. He has made >100 invited presentations at various conferences and academic institutions with >30 of those at institutions and conferences outside the U.S.
Dr. Virani has been a recipient of the Scott Grundy Award for Excellence in Lipids Metabolism Research from the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Jeremiah Stamler Distinguished Young Investigator Research Award. Dr. Virani serves as the Chair for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease Section of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), Chair for the ACC’s Global NCD Academy, and serves on the Board of Directors for the American Society of Preventive Cardiology. He has also served as Chair for the AHA's Cardiovascular Disease Statistics Committee and Chair for the Research and Publications Committee of the ACC’s PINNACLE Registry (the largest outpatient cardiovascular disease registry in the world). He also serves as the Associate Editor for Innovations for ACC.org and the Chair for Digital Strategy for the cardiovascular disease prevention related content for ACC.org. He has been inducted several times in the Best Doctors® Database (peer-reviewed group that includes the top 5% of U.S. physicians). More recently, Dr. Virani has served as a panel member for the 2018 AHA/ACC Multi-society Guideline on Cholesterol Management, the 2019 ACC/AHA Guideline for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease and the 2019 World Heart Federation/International Diabetes Federation’s Road Map on the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease among People Living with Diabetes.
Dr. Virani firmly believes in the notion of Civil Society that one of the most important objectives of being able to acquire quality education is to serve the communities in which we live and the communities in need. In that respect, he spends ~15-20 hours per week in voluntary service with a dedicated team of volunteers to (a) provide educational and behavioral intervention related resources to combat NCDs in the community (b) play an active role in health care capacity building for communities in South Asia, Central Asia, and East Africa.
Abstract
How Do We Assess, Personalize, Reclassify and Communicate Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Risk?
In this presentation, we will assess the 3 major steps to stratify atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk in a patient. We will start out with what risk assessment tools are available to assess this risk. We will then assess what other patients factors (not captured in the risk assessment tools) should clinicians keep in mind when assessing a patient’s ASCVD risk. Lastly, we will discuss how we can use imaging to further risk stratify patients in terms of both up classification and down classification of ASCVD risk. We will finally discuss how to use all these 3 concepts together to assess, personalize and reclassify ASCVD risk.
Is Atherosclerosis an Inflammatory or a Cholesterol Disorder?
In this presentation, we will first start out with how cholesterol lowering reduces atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD risk). We will then discuss historical perspective of how inflammation is associated with ASCVD risk. We will discuss how cholesterol and inflammation are related and how cholesterol lowering can also lower the ASCVD risk attributed to inflammation. We will then discuss whether selectively targeting inflammation without lowering cholesterol is also associated with a reduction in ASCVD risk based on novel therapies and therapies like colchicine.