Member Spotlight: Merle Myerson, MD, EdD, FACC, FNLA

Merle Myerson, MD, is a woman of many talents and a wearer of many hats. Her dedication to her work is more of a passion than a career, and according to her, it is her “vocation and avocation.”  As founder and director of the Mount Sinai Roosevelt and St. Luke’s Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Program & Lipid Clinic, Pre-Exercise Heart Screening Program, and Cardiology Section in the Institute for Advanced Medicine HIV Clinic, as well as an attending cardiologist, Dr. Myerson spends much of her time seeing patients but also has a passion for education teaching and research.

Dr. Myerson went into medicine because of her interest in public health and public service, but she also was very interested in exercise and sports — she holds a doctorate in Applied (Exercise) Physiology. She was and still is fascinated by how the human body works and can be pushed to the limit. Dr. Myerson almost went into orthopedics, but luckily for the lipid field and the NLA, she chose another path. During her first year in medical school she became interested in learning more about CVD prevention and that summer she was able to learn under the guidance of Dr. Thomas A. Pearson, a preventive cardiologist who also ran a lipid clinic at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y. After working under Dr. Pearson, there was no doubt in her mind what career path she would take. During her cardiology fellowship at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, she had the opportunity to learn from Dr. Henry Ginsberg and work in basic lipid research in his lab. She became a member of the NLA in 2005 and quickly found ways to become involved. She feels that the NLA is a wonderful organization in many ways, especially the multidisciplinary aspect. “We are all ‘one,’” she says. “In other words, it’s not the doctors over here and the nurses over there.” In recent years, she developed the New York Clinical Lipid Forum where healthcare providers and researchers gather to learn about lipids, and the last one was endorsed by the Northeast chapter of the NLA. The April 2015 Forum will focus on cardiovascular disease in patients living with HIV.

Dr. Myerson has made great strides in the clinical care and research of cardiovascular risk in HIV/AIDS patients. In 2008, the American Heart Association (AHA) published proceedings of a conference they had on an initiative to decrease cardiovascular risk and increase quality of care for patients living with HIV/AIDS. With her prevention and lipid hat on, Dr. Myerson read this and immediately saw a need that needed to be filled. This was a relatively unknown area at the time, as patients infected with HIV were just beginning to live to ages where CVD was prevalent and providers for these patients were not familiar with CVD issues. Dr. Myerson approached the leaders of her hospital’s very large HIV clinic and she soon began cardiology and lipid clinic sessions in the HIV outpatient clinics. She now has sessions at three sites and sees over 800 patients a year.

Dr. Myerson continues with her research on exercise and collaborates with the Exercise Physiology Laboratory at Columbia University, Teachers College where she earned her doctorate and is now an adjunct professor. She is currently investigating the influence of both aerobic and resistance exercise on the functional properties of the HDL particle.

Most of her day is spent in direct patient care with research, teaching, and administrative duties taking the remainder of her time and extending to nights and weekends.  In addition to enjoying patient care, Dr. Myerson feels that this allows her to be “in the trenches” and have insight into what clinical questions are important for research. Dr. Myerson thinks of herself as very fortunate because she’s able to spend her days doing something that she truly enjoys and is able to create new things. She also enjoys staying active by doing any and all outdoor activities such as running, cycling, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, and horseback riding. She values time spent with her family and friends including her canine buddies — three golden retrievers named Rudy, Ella, and Grace.