Dr. med Rainer Koch
A common strategy to quickly get your name into the literature on a topic you know little about is to publish a thorough literature review.
Having decided to move my career from a focus on hypertension to a broader interest in obesity, in 1999, Rainer Koch (a young medical intern at the time) and I, wrote a paper for Current Hypertension Reports, in which we summarized what was known at the time about the typical cardiovascular problems in obese patients.
The paper described the characteristic excentric left ventricular hypertrophy and left atrial dilatation, suggesting cardiac volume overload in obese patients, a finding that largely distinguished it from the more hypertension that was generally found in learner patients (albeit with abdominal adiposity), which is characterized by increased peripheral resistance and concentric hypertrophy.
We also reviewed the accumulating evidence showing marked improvement of ventricular dimensions and cardiac function in patients undergoing massive weight reduction following bariatric surgery.
Thus, long before I ever saw or began managing bariatric patients, I was already quite aware of the potential cardiovascular benefits of surgery in these patients.
According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited 23 times.
AMS
Fort Lauderdale, FL
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