John Adam Dormandy: championed new approaches to tackling peripheral arterial disease

Abstract

John Dormandy was a consultant vascular surgeon, researcher, and medical educator best known for innovative work on the diagnosis and management of peripheral arterial disease. He had a leading role in developing, and garnering international support for, uniform guidelines that had a major impact on vascular care among specialists.\n\nThe Trans-Atlantic Inter-Society Consensus on Management of Peripheral Arterial Disease (TASC) was published in 2000.1 Dormandy, a former president of clinical medicine at the Royal Society of Medicine, was the genial force behind it, steering cooperation between medical and surgical society experts in Europe and North America.\n\n“TASC became the standard for describing the severity of the problem that patients had and then defining what options there were to try and treat them,” says Alison Halliday, professor of vascular surgery at Oxford University who worked with Dormandy at St George’s Hospital, London. “It was the first time anybody had tried to get this general view on the complex picture of lower limb artery disease,” she says.\n\nDormandy, who became a consultant vascular surgeon at St George’s Hospital in 1973, would later set up a clinical trials unit there for new treatments and comparisons of drug therapy. He initiated and led numerous multicentre studies on the treatment of critical limb ischaemia, including prostacyclin trials, and on secondary prevention of vascular events in diabetic patients.\n\nOne of the novel treatments was the use of an angiogenesis stimulation to grow new blood vessels. He …