Dr G. B. John Mancini Underscores the Importance of Preventive Cardiology

Cardiovascular disease is one of the most common and costly health care problems worldwide, and preventive cardiology can be discussed as secondary, primary, or primordial. There is tremendous opportunity to work multilaterally, emphasized G.B. John Mancini, MD, professor of medicine; scientific director, Cardio Risk Clinic; and director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Core Laboratory, University of British Columbia.

On Day 1 of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology’s Congress on CVD Prevention, in the session, “What Is Preventive Cardiology,” Mancini presented, “The Canadian Perspective.”

Transcript

What is preventive cardiology, and why it is important to have an international perspective on this disease?

Cardiovascular disease is one of the most common and costly health care problems worldwide, and so preventive cardiology is generally discussed as secondary or primary or primordial. For example, secondary prevention would be, if someone has had a heart attack, you never want them to have another one—so you would treat accordingly all the risk factors. Primary prevention is someone who you don’t want to have a heart attack, but you know they have risk factors—they may have high blood pressure or they smoke—and so you want to deal with those things. Primordial prevention is avoiding the risk factors altogether—we don’t want our kids to become obese or to develop diabetes or to start smoking, etc.

So this conference, one of the themes is what is exactly preventive cardiology and who should be doing it. I think that there’s tremendous opportunity to work multilaterally. We have representation here from Europe; from Canada, through myself; and the US, talking about the training challenges, the clinical challenges of what is currently a multidisciplinary system, but which of course requires core competencies—whether this person is a cardiologist or an endocrinologist or what have you—and what those core competencies should be and how they should be delivered. Training programs is an area that I think is fruitful to pursue as a result of this conference.