The youngest presenter at the transcatheter cardiovascular therapeutics 2018 conference

Abstract

F ollow me as I outline my experience of presenting at one of world’s largest interventional cardiology conferences. Attending as an undergraduate is proof of what can be learned and experienced before diving into medical school. I hope for this article to inspire other members in BIOS to venture out and experience science where collaboration breeds interest and intelligence amongst people from all over: scientific conferences. My name is Stefan, and I am a physiology student at the University of Arizona. My aspirations include both business school and medical school, and many reading this are on the same exciting path. While I have presented at multiple school conferences in biochemistry and physiology, nothing has compared to the truly international experience of the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference, taking place one sunny September weekend in San Diego, California. San Diego, California. While shuffling in with the thousands of interventional cardiologists from around the world, I could not help but feel elation. My path to the TCT conference started with my first frog dissection in a compact seventh grade science classroom, where I became interested in the complexities of cardiovascular circulation. With the California sun shining, I was not only ready to elucidate past proposals and claims regarding the intricacies of coronary angiography, but ready to complete, what seemed to me, a major milestone in my path to medicine. In the first hour of the conference, if you were not standing around discussing the impending results of the COAPT trials, then you were most likely late or using the restroom. COAPT is an abbreviation for ‘‘Cardiovascular Outcomes Assessment of the MitraClip Percutaneous Therapy,’’ which analyzed the major clinical endpoints regarding use of the MitraClip. MitraClip is a medical device that acts to clamp the leaflets of the mitral valve as to prevent mitral regurgitation, which can be most easily described as unwanted flow back into the left atrium instead of into the aorta. With this ‘‘divided flow,’’ the heart must work harder in order to get blood systemically to the body, leading to the heart muscle hypertrophying, bringing about significant complications. A unique clinical aspect of the MitraClip is its use in ‘‘functional’’ mitral regurgitation following congestive heart failure, where the expansion of the heart caused by increased blood in the left ventricle causes the valves to spread apart, leading to regurgitation. In the past, the MITRA-FR study showed dismal results Correspondence to: [email protected]