What is Preventive Cardiology?
Preventive Cardiology is a specialty of cardiology that focusses on identifying and treating heart disease risk factors. The goal is to eliminate or reduce risk to prevent or delay the onset of heart disease.
Primary and Secondary Prevention
Primary prevention refers to helping patients with no known heart problems lower their risk of developing heart disease. This is currently one of the fastest-growing fields in cardiology — cardiovascular disease is the biggest cause of death worldwide. Treating severe heart disease is difficult, expensive and often has disappointing outcomes. However most heart disease is preventable, so this should be everyone’s goal.
Secondary prevention is for patients who already have heart problems. After a heart attack lifestyle changes (healthy eating and regular exercise) and medications can reduce the risk of heart failure or having another heart attack. Quite often, unfortunately, plaque continues to build up in these patient’s arteries and their disease worsens. A Preventive Cardiologist seeks to aggressively address each and every risk factor driving this process. Secondary prevention typically involves more intensive treatment goals than primary prevention because the patient is sicker and the risk of disease progression is higher. Use of low-dose aspirin is far more common and blood pressure and cholesterol targets tend to be lower. More intensive therapies can sometimes cause more unwanted side effects, but the benefits tend to outweigh the possible risks.