NELA Chapter Update: A Year of Virtual Gatherings and More Plans

The 2021 NELA Chapter is happy to co-sponsor this edition of the LipidSpin, along with our SELA colleagues, on Racial and Ethnic Differences and Disparities in Lipidology. The NELA Chapter Board would like to personally thank all NELA/SELA authors and contributors to this issue as well as the editors.

The NELA membership continues to grow and now includes over 500 lipid specialist colleagues. Special thanks to NELA Treasurer, Roda Plakogianis, PharmD, who helped register a significant number of new NELA members in the last one and a half years. Please congratulate our new NELA members in 2020-21, as well as those who became Fellows of the NLA this year.

The NELA regional board met twice virtually over the past year to discuss more ways to grow the chapter and add value for our existing members. Our NELA ‘game plan’ included encouraging more junior faculty and care team partners to become members, and promoting the mentorship program, “How Can We Help You” Campaign. We also emphasized the importance of educating local colleagues in lipidology and prevention through lectures in our own medical communities that promote NLA positions and statements. The NELA endorsed two educational webinars this year, one being the 2nd Annual Northwell “From Prevention to Intervention” Cardiovascular Updates course in New York this past June. The webinar included NELA members Dr. Eugenia Gianos (current NELA President), Dr. Ben Hirsh, Dr. Guy Mintz (NELA President-Elect) and Rachel Nahrwald as core faculty planners and speakers. Other NELA members spoke on lipidology, prevention, and NLA positions for the professional chapters of the ACC and ACP.

Regional board member Dr. Merle Myerson and Dr. Karen Aspry (Immediate Past President) also worked on a strategy to engage former members of the New England Lipid Club, with one idea being invitations for them to participate in a NELA “Best of the NLA sessions” once or twice a year, with a tentative first date this coming fall. Finally, a few of us thought about how to use social media to encourage NLA membership through a campaign of tweets about ‘Why I’m a Lipid Specialist’ that would highlight patient stories and show prospective members how lipid specialists change the lives of patients and their families. We invite all NLA members, especially those from the social media workgroup, to send comments on this potential outreach idea.

On the broader education front, the NELA board also promoted the idea of a Lipid Library that would be accessible to NLA members only and provide free educational content accredited for continuing education credits. Recognizing the large and longstanding gap in medical nutrition education and the growing need for more lifestyle promotion by health systems, the NELA Board, with the help of President-Elect Dr. Guy Mintz, also submitted a proposal to the NLA Executive 32 LipidSpin • Volume 19, Issue 2 • November 2021Board for an in-depth online course on nutrition and cardiometabolic health for clinical lipid specialists and the greater medical community. Finally, to assist trainees pursuing more education and careers in lipidology over the past year, the NELA Chapter also provided three lipid scholarships to deserving trainee members. Finally, many NELA members have been actively publishing research and reviewing articles in 2020-21.

NELA members Dean Karalis and Linda Hemphill, and other NLA members of the Health Quality and Research Committee, published an NLA survey of primary care physicians on recognition and treatment of homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in July 2020. (See: Hemphill L, Goldberg A, Hovingh K, Cohen J, Karalis DG. Recognition and Treatment of Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia by Primary Care Physicians: a Survey from the National Lipid Association. J Gen Intern Med. 2020;35(7):2225-2227.)

Other NELA members co-authored lipid-related articles or abstracts on:

• EHR detection of familial hypercholesterolemia (Daniel Soffer, Marina Cuchel, Daniel Rader, Douglas Jacoby)
• Lipid treatment in women (Eugenia Gianos, Dean Karalis, Guy Mintz, Merle Myerson)
• Prevalence and treatment of familial hypercholesterolemia in young patients with CAD in a local NCDR CathPCI Registry (Karen Aspry)
• Evaluation of a multidisciplinary lipid clinic using an implementation science framework (Laney Jones, David Kann, Megan Betts, and Michael Lesko)
• Role of antisense therapies targeting lipoprotein(a) (Roda Plakogiannis)

All in all, it’s been a productive year, and we look forward to even more strides and to connecting with everyone in-person in 2021–22!

Disclosure statement:
Dr. Jones has no financial disclosures to report.