DUCCS members who activated their membership in June:
REMINDER: It’s time to activate your DUCCS Membership. Please contact kathy.shuping@dm.duke.edu if you have any questions on how to activate your membership
St LEUIS – PI: Brent Muhlestein. Smartphone Twelve Lead ECG Utility In STEMI. Validation of a new ECG app and device’s ability to accurately assess the presence of ST segment changes or new T waves suggestive of an acute ischemic event in patients presenting with chest pain against the gold standard 12 lead ECG. The pilot study manuscript appears in the Journal of Electrocardiology. Smartphone ECG for evaluation of STEMI Results of the ST LEUIS_in press Five DUCCS sites are now in the start up phase of a multicenter study – Stay tuned!
We would like to introduce you to the Intermountain Health ST LEUIS Team members: From left to right their names are Brent Muhlestein, Ben Chisum, Kevin Johnson, Lisa Bredthauer, Kristin Konery, Terrel Holloway, Fidela Moreno and Viet Le. Not pictured: Angie Schwab
Saturday, August 15, 2015 – General Cardiology Update for Duke Raleigh
Mark Leithe, MD, – Renaissance Hotel in North Hills, Raleigh
Saturday, September 19, 2015 – 3rd Annual Duke Advanced Heart Failure Symposium
G. Michael Felker, MD, MHS & Joseph Rogers, MD
Sheraton Imperial RTP, Durham
Sat. & Sun., September 26–27, 2015 – Duke Advanced Vascular Access Symposium
Sunil Rao, MD – Sheraton Imperial RTP, Durham
Saturday, October 24, 2015 –Duke Cardiovascular Imaging Symposium
Eric Velazquez, MD & Zainab Samad, MD, MHS – TBD (Durham, NC)
Friday–Sunday, December 4–6, 2015 – Duke Cardiology Regional Update
L. Kristin Newby, MD, MHS & Sana Al-Khatib, MD, MHS – Renaissance Hotel, Asheville
Thank you to the following DUCCS members who activated their annual membership in April.
It is with great pleasure that we introduce our new DUCCS Board members. Please join us in welcoming them. We look forward to their participation and their contribution to the organization.
Since its inception DUCCS has been a great resource bridging the academic passage to the world of private and clinical practice, and remains a wonderful link for former Felllows to our academic roots. Dean A. Bramlet MD FACC FAHA FNLA
The DUCCS Website is now live. Thank you to the Cardiology Division for their support, thank you to Daniel Beyer and his team and to EVERYONE who has made this possible! We hope that you find the DUCCS website full helpful. If there is information that you would like included, please let us know.
n engl j med 372;9 nejm.org february 26, 2015
The pdf file: nejmp1501253
Eldoret is a city of about 250,000 in western Kenya, at an elevation of 6500 ft. It is home to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and the Moi University School of Medicine. For the past several years, Duke has been working to establish a cardiology Center of Excellence there. I responded to a DUCCS newsletter about this effort. My wife Jean and I spent October and November, 2014 there.
The experience was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. The Kenyan people are friendly and welcoming, hardworking and eager to learn. I did a lot of teaching, most directly related to patients on the cardiac unit. The spectrum of heart disease was very different from the USA. Rheumatic valve disease is frequent, aggressive, and causes severe stenosis and regurgitation early. The youngest patient I saw with severe valvular disease was 8 years old. Pulmonary hypertension is also common, and seems due mostly to indoor air pollution from cooking with small fires in small, poorly ventilated homes. Ninety percent of the population outside of major urban areas still cooks this way. Needless to say, this problem affects women mostly, and the severe elevation in pulmonary pressures causes profound right heart failure among women in their 40’s. Congenital disease, either unrecognized or untreated, was also frequent. I saw only 2 STEMIs, 2 NSTEMIs, and no one with a bradyarrhythmia requiring a pacer. [Perhaps the shorter life span does not allow for the conduction disease to develop.]
The available drugs were adequate, thanks to the large number of generics in most classes. Urgent surgery is impossible to achieve now. Elective surgery can be arranged but takes weeks or months to accomplish. There is lots of interest in improving that situation over time.
There is a huge amount of work to be done. We saw ourselves as part of an effort that will take decades to achieve the goals of prevention, early detection, and appropriate treatment. It was fun to work alongside our Kenyan colleagues to move this process along.
John Burks
We honor the memory of Dr. Michael Davidson, the son of long-time DUCCS member, Robert M. Davidson, M.D. Michael died following a shooting while seeing patients in his clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston on January 20th. Michael had a long connection with Duke Medical Center, having been born there, while his dad, Bob, was a Cardiology fellow at Duke.
Although he grew up mostly in Southern California, he subsequently attended Princeton University and Yale Medical School, and then once again, returned to Duke Medical Center, where he did his internship and residency in Surgery at Duke, and spent a year in the lab of Dr. Robert Lefkowitz and Walter Koch, doing research on G-Protein receptors in the heart. During his residency, he met Terri Halperin, a medical student at Duke, and they subsequently married at the Duke Hillel facility on campus in 2001. They then moved to Boston, where Michael completed his surgical residency and went on to a fellowship in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He took an additional year in the cardiac cath lab, where he learned interventional cardiology, which he would later combine with his surgical training to pioneer the “hybrid” procedure approach to cardiac interventions. Following his training program, he joined the cardiac surgery staff of the Brigham in 2006, and later became the Director of Endovascular Cardiac Surgery. Being the “complete” interventionalist, he would often perform a diagnostic cardiac catheterization, and then take the patient to the OR for surgery or perform a transcatheter valvular or aortic intervention with other members of the team. He enjoyed teaching, and was an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard University School of Medicine.
He is survived, by his parents and wife, his sister Hillary, and children Kate, Liv and Graham, along with a yet to be born baby daughter. He will be deeply missed, not only by his family, friends and colleagues, but by his many grateful patients.
Contributed by Bob Davidson
