Hundreds of practitioners gathered today at the Boston Park Plaza for the annual conference from Cardiometabolic Health Congress (CMHC). In the past 17 years, this medical conference has grown to be the biggest and most-anticipated event in evidence-based education for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors.
12:05 p.m. EST — Robert H. Eckel, MD, took the stage to welcome the audience of providers in primary care, cardiology, endocrinology, obesity medicine, nutrition, lifestyle, nephrology, women’s health, and many more specialties.
“I’m theoretically retired, but it’s a pleasure to be here for another year of cardiometabolic health education,” Dr. Eckel began. “When you use your brain for 45 years, it’s not easy to stop.”
12:10 p.m. EST — The first speaker of the pre-conference, Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, MD, began by inviting attendees to join CMHC and the American Heart Association (AHA) in Chicago next month for a CME Dinner Symposium. In his presentation on Healthy Aging and Cardiometabolic Risk, he remarked, “When we talk about the three Ms of cardiovascular risk, we want them to be Measurable, Monitorable, and Modifiable,” Dr. Lloyd-Jones explained.
He announced that in June of 2022, the AHA had updated their Life’s Simple 7 guidelines to include a new metric of sleep, renaming it Life’s Essential 8.
He went on to discuss the concept of “compression of morbidity,” joking, “We are all going to die. I hope that doesn’t shock anyone. But compression of morbidity means that the ideal way to die is to get sick as close as possible to your date of death. We want to compress that morbidity to, say, the final two months of life, so we aren’t spending as much of our life sick.”
2:00 p.m. EST — The pre-conference Primetime CME Symposium, Making Sense of LDL-C Combination Therapy in 2022: Strategies and Pearls to Move Beyond Inertia to Improve Patient Outcomes, was chaired by Christie M. Ballantyne, MD.
As Erin D. Michos, MD, began introducing a real patient case to demonstrate how lowering LDL-C can reduce ASCVD risk, she commented that “cumulative low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) can be achieved through favorable genetics, healthy lifestyle, or early intervention. Whichever the reason, we see that lower lifetime risk of ASCVD is demonstrated in people that never cross the threshold into high LDL-C levels, and if you can lower LDL-C, you can reduce risk.”
3:35 p.m. EST — The final sessions of the day featured Marie E. McDonnell, MD, who shared her insights on Deprescribing in Older Adults with Type 2 Diabetes.
She said that by the end of her lecture on this topic near and dear to her, she hoped the audience would not consider this concept DEprescribing, but rather, REprescribing, in which “the practice of categorizing your patients not just by their age – but by their overall health with consideration of cognitive impairment – will help you decide how much preventative potential you have.”
She elaborated, “There are complex links we should keep in mind – cognitive impairment is about 70% higher in older adults with diabetes than in their non-diabetic counterparts.”
4:15 p.m. EST — An Expert Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A closed out the first day of the 17th Annual CMHC, with Dr. Eckel serving as moderator.
Many of the day’s presenters joined him onstage to review the day’s topics, which focused on increasing cardiometabolic health and the overall number of healthy years for older adults.
Please join us again tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022, for the second day of the conference.
Topics on the agenda include Late Breaking Trials and FDA Approvals, the Keynote Address, Therapeutic Inertia in Cardiometabolic Disease from Louis Philipson, MD, PhD, Dispelling Common Myths About Obesity, The Intersection of NASH and Cardiometabolic Diseases, and much more.
