HCPLive’s Post

Transcript

You know, it's so interesting, it's such a fabulous time to be a health care provider because the tools in our toolbox have really grown in the last few years as to what we can do with respect to preventing heart attacks and strokes. And we know that heart disease is the number one killer, men and women, both here in the US and worldwide. And yet 80% of heart attacks and strokes are preventable with the optimal risk factor management. So to me. Let us a really positive empowering message that is the health care provider. I have things I can offer my patients that can help reduce their risk. And in the last couple of years, obesity has really taken center stage in terms of how much attention it's getting. And I like to call it the first domino because obesity is a domino that causes all the other dominoes to fall, including diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, kidney disease, inflammation being another one. Obesity related inflammation is huge. So if we can really go upstream. And start to treat the root cause of the problem being obesity. We can actually prevent our circumvent a lot of these diseases. Obesity, I would say it's a huge modifiable risk factors that we as healthcare providers now have tools in our toolbox with the GLP one receptor agonists and GLPG IP agents, where before we just put it on the patient, we said you go out there, lose weight, you know, diet and exercise and that's the only way that you can do it. So I have really taken that to be very positive. Now we know that the obesity drugs aren't just about obesity. Anymore they're actually about reducing cardiovascular outcomes and that was the select trial that showed us that thema glue tide given to patients with cardiovascular disease who are not diabetic can actually reduce major adverse cardiovascular events. So by treating the obesity, I've actually reducing their heart disease risk. But as I talked about those other dominoes, diabetes is a huge one. We've also shifted in diabetes care from looking just at glycemic control to now thinking about outcomes. In diabetes and so to me this is a huge change in the paradigm in the way that I think about it because we always used to talk about A1CA1CA1C target. Now we're saying regardless of the A1C, we want to get them on these right agents, the SGLT 2 inhibitors, the GLP one receptor agonist, if they have microalbuminuria, the non steroidal mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists like finerenone to reduce their risk, their cardiovascular risk and to also protect. Their organ. So another very exciting time in diabetes management. Hypertension has continued to be sort of a mainstay of a modifiable risk factor that we're seeing more and more people becoming hypertensive because of our processed food, diet and what have you. But we have novel agents including endothelin receptor antagonist that are on the horizon for managing hypertension in addition to the old friends that we've had for many years. And then the last one is inflammation. This is a huge one. Because I call it the final common pathway, right? Because a lot of these other pathways, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, all sort of lead to inflammation. And that's where it's really exciting to have this novel agent, low dose colchicine, which is the first time we have had an outcomes based agent that reduces inflammation that's actually available to us as practitioners. So I really exciting time to be a doctor, lots of modifiable things that we can do. Lots of rewards we can get from reducing the mates events in our patient.