In April, New York City-based NYU Langone Health launched a new aortic care center, led by Medical Director Geraldine Ong, MD, and Mark Peterson, MD, PhD, a cardiothoracic surgeon and professor in the department of cardiothoracic surgery at NYU.
Dr. Ong, who recently joined NYU from St. Michael’s Hospital at the University of Toronto, will work alongside Dr. Peterson to establish and run the new program.
In addition, she will work as a clinical associate professor in the department of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Dr. Ong spoke with Becker’s about launching the new center with Dr. Peterson, the challenges the duo is facing and the importance of multidisciplinary care in the field of cardiology and aortic care.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: Tell me a bit about your new role, and your goals for the role.
Dr. Geraldine Ong: This is a new program for NYU, the Aortic Center. What we’ll offer is really a multidisciplinary approach, where we look at this disease through different lenses. Aortic disease is quite rare as a disease, but most importantly, it involves different aspects of the human body. The disease can have a genetic cause, so there is a gene component, there’s a disease aspect because it manifests itself as aortic aneurysms and can be linked to valve disease, which is the narrowing of the aortic valve or aortic regurigation. So those are associated things. It can also be linked to congenitive disease. It links different aspects of genetics to different manifestations in the body, and the management of it includes different specialties as well. It often requires surgery, so patients need expert specialized aortic surgeons to fix the disease, whether it’s replacing the valve, doing valve sparing, replacing the aorta and different types of grafs, so there’s nuances in surgical aspects, and there’s long-term follow-up needed for this disease, since you are born with it and will die with it.
Patients also require special care in regards to imaging, expert cardiology care for managing blood pressure, exercise specialists and dietary recommendations specific to the disease and also it can affect family members as well. We want to make sure we screen every appropriate family member. It branches out to different aspects, so that’s the spirit of our aortic clinic, to work in partnership with an aortic surgeon and also have other specialists working in conjunction with us. Not directly in the clinic, but we partner with vascular surgeons, ophthalmologists, plastic surgeons, radiologists, all different other specialties we communicate with closely. We are two physicians that spearhead the role, taking leadership positions. In the team we have three nurse practitioners, another surgeon and a genetic counselor who helps us see all the patients.
Q: Why did you decide to join NYU Langone?
GO: The appeal is I have worked with Dr. Peterson, the program leader, at a previous hospital in Toronto, so we have already established a partnership. He moved to NYU two years ago and there’s something exciting about starting a new program as well. Offering a service that did not exist at all as it is really specialized care and there are not a lot of specialized centers in the world. What is nice at NYU is there are so many specialists already present and inhouse for other departments, making communication and collaboration quite easy. It’s easy to talk to other people and provide multidisciplinary care.
Q: What challenges, if any, do you expect in this new role/in your job in general?
GO: At this point, we want to reach out and create awareness of the disease. Since it’s not common, people may not be aware of all of the nuances or not even known to refer patients with aneurysms to us. They don’t know they might require specific genetic testing and imaging to really diagnose the disease. At this point, it’s spreading the word and making everyone aware that this is a condition that needs special care.
Q: What are the biggest trends you are watching in cardiology right now?
GO: There are many things that are very interesting. The first thing is genetic testing. Genetic testing is a fairly new field in cardiology as a whole. Every year, we are discovering new genes, new variants that can be associated with this condition. This is a worldwide effort. All of the centers around the world are doing genetic testing and pooling our data and publishing our new findings of new genes. That is fast growing, and in the last five years has changed a lot. That allows us to diagnose the disease and target specific patients to give very individualized recommendations. Also, the surgical techniques have evolved as well. I am very fortunate to work with Dr. Peterson, who has access to the newest grafts and techniques so we can do these procedures with new technology. For traditional surgery, there are more options than just putting in a traditional valve. There are valve-sparing surgeries, and very expert surgeries that have more benefits than simply replacing the valve. Patients that undergo valve sparing no longer need to be on lifelong blood thinners. This has a lot of benefits, especially for young patients. This improves survival and lifestyle.
What’s nice about NYU and our center, we believe in very intense post-doc care, so we extubate the patient after big heart surgeries on the same day and get patients walking only a few hours after surgery. They are usually discharged two or three days later, while traditionally patients in the hospital would be there for five days. We believe doing it this way at NYU speeds up patient recovery, leads to less complications and improves experience. This offers better quality of life. We are fortunate at NYU to have a big team in our aortic center and follow patients closely, even at home.
Q: Is there anything else you want to expand on?
GO: Nowadays, medicine has changed a lot. What I’ve seen throughout my career is it’s not just one doctor with one patient in one room anymore. Patients get better care if we work in collaboration with other specialties. Aortic diseases require so many different specialists. Having a multidisciplinary approach really improves patient care. Having a disease, especially chronic diseases, can be quite scary. They’ll have this for the rest of their lives, especially if they need heart surgery. Having different providers during one visit and having information coming from different sources is good for a patient. Patients are a whole person, not just one organ.
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