Anu Lala-Trindade, MD
Dr. Lala is an Associate Professor of Cardiology and Population Health at the Icahn School of Mount Sinai, Director of Heart Failure Research, Data Coordinating Center Leadership for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Cardiothoracic Surgery Network, Program Director for the Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Fellowship at Icahn Mount Sinai, and Deputy Editor of the Journal of Cardiac Failure.
Dr. Lala has a passion for patient centered care that incorporates personal, spiritual, and cultural beliefs alongside evidenced-based medicine. She cares equally about educating the next generation of physicians and partakes in numerous teaching activities. Dr. Lala believes that words matter in the care of patients and their families and she emphasizes this with her trainees. For this reason, she prefers to discuss “heart function” rather than “heart failure,” a more worrisome term.
“I adore the conduct of clinical trials to help establish what evidence underlies our various therapeutic approaches to heart disease,” says Dr. Lala. “I am a firm advocate for women's cardiovascular health and multidisciplinary care.”
Currently Dr. Lala is involved with a number of studies devoted to better understanding how heart failure affects women differently than men and what treatments may better serve women in given scenarios. She is also working on better understanding which patients with multivessel coronary disease and low heart function/ejection fraction would benefit from revascularization.
Through the Journal of Cardiac Failure, Dr. Lala advocates for innovative ways to conduct peer review and push a number of initiatives including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and mentorship forward in academic publishing. Dr. Lala serves as the associate chair of the DEI Taskforce for the Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network, striving to enhance diverse and equitable enrollment of patients for cardiothoracic surgery and structural heart disease trials.
Krishna K. Patel, MD
Dr. Patel is a cardiologist with expertise in advanced multimodality cardiovascular imaging, including cardiac positron emissions testing (PET) and nuclear cardiology, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, and cardiac computed tomography (CT). Her clinical interests include women’s heart health and care of pregnant women with cardiovascular disease and ischemia with no obstructive coronary arteries (INOCA) or microvascular angina, and prevention of cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Patel’s research focuses on evaluating ways to diagnose and treat disease of small vessels of heart (microvascular disease) using noninvasive imaging techniques, identifying patients who should be referred for revascularization (stenting or bypass surgery) after stress testing, the relationship between symptoms and ischemia, and use of cardiac PET, especially myocardial flow reserve in clinical decision-making and prognosis of patients with stable coronary artery disease.
Her research also includes the study of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), validating PROMs for use to assess health status in women, and developing risk prediction models that would serve as a foundation for creating shared decision-making tools for patients.
“As a clinician and a researcher, I strive to keep my patients’ goals and priorities at the center of the care I deliver and the research I perform. The overarching goal of my research is to promote adoption of patient-centered care with a focus on cardiovascular prevention and cardiac imaging.”
Current research projects include: (1) developing an algorithm to identify and treat women and men with INOCA using noninvasive cardiac imaging techniques such as cardiac PET and cardiac CT; (2) studying the underlying mechanisms that help explain why novel cardiac risk factors in women (such as pre-eclampsia and premature menopause) are associated with higher risk of future cardiovascular events; and (3) identifying the treatment goals of older men and women with coronary artery disease and studying the role of non-invasive imaging techniques in evaluation of chest pain among older adults.