REAWAKENING
For patients with heart failure, a new beginning
Advanced heart failure affects more Americans than ever before. End-stage heart
disease used to be considered the closing chapter of one’s life. With new options
to extend life, experts at the Scott & White Heart and Vascular Institute are giving
patients a second chance to live.
It
beats 100,000 times a day.
That’s how hard the heart works
to pump oxygen and nutrient-rich
blood through your body. Many of us are
lucky because our hearts will beat strongly
throughout our lives. For an increasing
number of people, however, acquired heart
disease and congenital birth defects will
contribute to a heart’s decline. It then
becomes necessary to turn to the resources
offered by cardiovascular specialists at Scott
& White Healthcare.
The new Advanced Heart Failure Clinic
at Scott & White offers patients the most
sophisticated treatment options available
for end-stage heart failure. For Central
Texas patients whose hearts can no longer
function on their own, this is the dawn of
an exciting new day.
After the heart has done all it can to
pump on its own and help sustain life,
medications and insertion of an implantable
pacemaker/defibrillator have been preferred
methods of treatment. When optimal
medical management fails, more advanced
heart failure therapies are needed.
Mechanical circulatory support and heart
“I’ve never had a
specialist, once
you were past the
critical stage,
stick with you,
and [Dr. Nair] does.”
—Rick Meyer
transplantation help end-stage heart failure
patients by supporting or completely
replacing the damaged heart. These
options of last resort were not easily
available for Central Texans. The good
news is that things have now changed.
Visionary leadership, the recruitment of
subspecialists in cardiac care, and an
investment in infrastructure have helped
make this day a reality.
Scott & White is ideally prepared to deal
with what cardiologists believe will be a heart
failure epidemic in the coming decades.
Baby boomers are aging, and thanks to
advances in medicine, more people are
surviving heart attacks and other conditions.
As these factors converge, people will
become prime candidates for heart failure
later in life, says Nandini Nair, MD,
cardiologist and medical director of the heart
transplant service at Scott & White. “As
Rick Meyer counts on Scott & White’s advanced heart
failure specialists to manage his condition.
4
THE CATALYST Winter 11 | www.sw.org