Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

This years’ ESC HF congress was hosted by the City of Light, Paris. The congress is one of the flagships of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), welcoming well over 5,000 attendants.

The congress kicked off with two major trials: the RELAX-AHF 2 (serelaxin) and TRUE-HF (ularitide), which were simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Another major focus of the congress was the implementation of the 2016 heart failure guidelines, featuring several sessions with lively discussions. Further, the growing epidemic of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction was discussed, and experts from other fields such as diabetes and atrial fibrillation discussed their importance. A growing and successful track is the basic and translational track, in which working mechanisms of old and new drugs, of cardiomyopathies and other aspects of HF are addressed in more detail.

Paris was a fantastic venue, the Palais de Congrès being centrally located within walking distance of l’Arc de Triomphe, les Champs-Elysées, and la Tour Eiffel.

ESC HF 2017 turned out to be a wonderful “rendez-vous with the future’’ and next years’ congress will be in another historical and vibrant city, Vienna, with the theme: “classical repertoire, modern instruments’’. I sincerely hope to meet all of you again!

With my warmest regards,

Rudolf de Boer

Cardiologist, UMC Groningen, the Netherlands

Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (FESC)

Fellow of the Heart Failure Association (FHFA)

HFA Board member



 

Biography

Rudolf de Boer (1972, Gouda, the Netherlands) is a Clinical Cardiologist and a Full Professor of (Translational) Cardiology at the University Medical Center Groningen. He studied medicine in Groningen and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. His basic research focuses on cardiac remodeling, fibrosis, metabolic changes and diabetes. He connects mechanisms with clinical data e.g. from the LifeLines study, of which he was a founding member the scientific committee. His clinical interests span from inherited cardiomyopathies to end-stage heart failure.

Dr. de Boer has authored and co-authored over 250 articles in peer reviewed journals and wrote over 10 book chapters. He was appointed a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in 2010, is the current the president of the Heart Failure Working Group of the Dutch Society of Cardiology and Board Member and Chair of the Basic Section of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the ESC.



Posted on 2 May 201717 March 2021