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Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 2004;26:1063-1072
© 2004 Elsevier Science NL

EACTS Presidential address

The next challenge—adapting to change

Wessex Cardiothoracic Centre—Mailpoint 46, Southampton General Hospital, Tremona Road, Southampton SO16 6YD, UK

^* Tel.: +44 2380 796241; fax: +44 2380 796614. (E-mail: monro1711@aol.com).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

It has been a very great honour and climax to my career to serve as President of this Association and I would like to thank you for trusting me with this responsibility. It is always nice to be associated with success, and the birth and formative years of this Association have been an undoubted success, as can be seen from the increasing attendance at the Annual Meeting (Fig. 1).

View larger version (73K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 1. The European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Foreseeing the future is an art. One can get quite a good idea from past trends, but we have to adapt and do the best we can, and this is our next challenge. Undoubtedly one of the major changes that has already occurred and will affect us more in the future is the reduction in coronary artery surgery. The increasing use of stenting by the cardiologists, and particularly with drug eluting stents, has resulted in fewer patients with coronary artery disease being treated primarily by surgery (Fig. 2). I say primarily because as coronary artery disease is a progressive disease, these patients will develop further stenoses and many will eventually come to surgery.

View larger version (83K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 2. The annual incidence of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in the United Kingdom.

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