In recent years, preventive cardiology has spontaneously emerged as its own “subspecialty” across multiple disciplines, including cardiology, endocrinology, internal medicine, and primary care, but there remains no consensus on the boundaries of preventive cardiology, Sergio Fazio, MD, PhD, said at the third annual Heart in Diabetes conference.

Fazio, who is director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at Knight Cardiovascular Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, addressed the issue of lipid management and its purview under the endocrinology and cardiology disciplines. Fazio, along with others in the field, has proposed that preventive cardiology should be its own subspecialty. But the question remains: to which medical specialty would preventive cardiology belong?

“The practice of cardiometabolic medicine is part of a larger preventive cardiology umbrella,” said Dr. Fazio, who is an endocrinologist and preventive cardiologist. “In both academic and private settings, preventive cardiology best serves the needs of patients by being part of a cardiology enterprise.”

However, there are a number of biases when it comes to this discussion, including “perceptions that lipid metabolism is an endocrine domain ... [and also that] some don’t see the difference between preventive cardiology and the lipid clinic,” Dr. Fazio said.

During his presentation, Dr. Fazio argued that “deep knowledge of lipid metabolism is not an endocrine domain. It is also not a cardiology domain. It is the domain of committed preventive cardiologists. Preventive cardiology is a lot more than managing lipids and diagnosing dyslipidemia. Cardiology has contributed to the field [of preventive cardiology] from its inception and has secured its title as the home for this discipline.”

However, challenges remain. Lipid and glucose disorders are common, underdiagnosed, and undertreated, Dr. Fazio said. Expertise in lipid and glucose metabolism is not only for the heart. Patients need expert lipid and glucose management as well as expert cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk assessment and management. But, without consensus, many hospitals have diabetes centers, lipid clinics, and preventive cardiology services as competing enterprises, he said.

“The field faces a tremendous opportunity to finally acquire status as a subspecialty, and trademark confusions and redundancies should be addressed urgently and with clarity and consensus,” Dr. Fazio said.

What does the future hold?

“It’s our obligation to create a structure for the next generation of people who want to do what we do, but we need to agree on what we call it, and I think that should be preventive cardiology, not cardiometabolic medicine,” Dr. Fazio told the audience at Heart in Diabetes.