DEAR COLLEAGUES!

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty fed up with the countless conferences and roundtables on cardiology. And all about chronic heart failure, coronary heart disease, arterial hypertension. As if therapy doesn't have any other topics besides the heart (and, well, coronavirus)! I can already hear the usual opponents objecting: "How could it be otherwise? Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide!"

Well, maybe so. But these statistics seem quite distorted to me. Judge for yourself. A person who has suffered from diabetes for half their life can die from a completely standard complication – a heart attack or stroke. The same can be said for a patient with late-stage chronic kidney disease. Where on the mortality histogram will they fall? Of course, that very first one – cardiovascular!

And the same can be said about tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of people for whom a heart attack will be the finale of a long-standing illness.

And what about death "from old age"? Remember Blok?

Oh, foolish heart,
Laughing boy,
When will you stop beating?

It will stop, Alexander Alexandrovich, it will definitely stop. Even if you live to be a hundred without any serious ailments, you will still die when the "laughing boy" finishes laughing. And they will write on your certificate that you died of acute heart failure. And you will end up, no matter how you look at it, in the same column of the statistical histogram.

And yet, we've dedicated this issue to cardiology. I think you'll find it interesting. Pericarditis, diastolic dysfunction, pulmonary embolism, and even... "broken heart syndrome."

Enjoy reading!

Professor I.V. Egorov