President's Column

Vera Bittner, MD, MSPH
University of Alabama at Birmingham

As 2003 draws to a close, I wanted to give you a brief update about SELA. Our chapter membership continues to grow, with 34 new members since the Annual Meeting in August of this year. Under Chris Seymour's able management, SELA's finances are sound despite a fund-raising environment that has become increasingly challenging. Dan Wise and Dean Bramlet are working very hard on next year's meeting program and, if the draft agenda presented at the November Board Meeting is any indication, the conference, held jointly with the NLA, will be superb with a nice balance between cutting edge science and clinical applications.

What can we do to make SELA even better? What sets us apart from other professional organizations, is our inclusiveness, which is reflected in our mission statement: "To foster a multidisciplinary team approach to lipid management and prevention of cardiovascular disease." SELA has been very successful in providing a forum where academically based physicians and those in practice can learn from each other, but as our membership breakdown shows, we have not been quite as successful in getting adequate representation from the other key professionals involved in cardiovascular disease prevention, the nurses and nurse practitioners who are the back bone of successful lipid clinics, the dieticians and diabetes educators without whom we stand no chance to successfully manage the interrelated epidemics of obesity, metabolic syndrome and overt diabetes, and the pharmacists whose guidance we need to safely administer ever more complex medication regimens to our patients. Many of our patients are exceedingly sedentary and we need input from exercise physiologists and cardiac rehabilitation professionals to become more effective counselors in safely promoting increased physical activity. Two articles in the November 5 issue of JAMA point out that cardiovascular risk factors in childhood strongly predict subclinical atherosclerosis among young adults and, presumably, symptomatic disease and mortality at more advanced ages. In our current membership, pediatricians and others involved in the care of children and adolescents are a very small minority. I believe that SELA is the ideal forum to bring together health professionals involved in cardiovascular disease prevention throughout the life span. During my tenure as president, I am hopeful that we will not only be able to expand SELA membership, but that we will also be able to increase its diversity.

We also need to think about the next generation of health care professionals. I am very happy that Himanshu Gupta, MD, a cardiology fellow from my institution, has joined the SELA Board of Directors with the specific aim to increase involvement of cardiology and endocrinology fellows, adult primary care and pediatric residents, and students/trainees in all related disciplines. In addition to targeted mailings to schools and training programs, he is planning to organize a clinical poster competition for next year's meeting. His plans were strongly endorsed by the Board at its recent meeting and we are well on our way to secure funding to provide free registration and travel awards for the best poster entries. For those of you who have contact with students and trainees, please help spread the word.

I am looking forward to a challenging year; knowing that I can count on advice from the entire cadre of past presidents and from past and present Board members makes the task a little less daunting. I would also like to encourage all of you who are members of SELA to be active in the association, to provide your ideas, voice your concerns, and participate in the future development of your organization.