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This week's expert interview is with Dr. Emily Andaya, Medical Director of the Cardiovascular Program at Major Health Partners of Shelbyville, IN. She joins Louise Campbell and Roger Green to discuss the American Heart Assocation's CKM initiative, why she believe it should be titled "CKLM" for liver, and how including liver in the CKM scoring system would make it stronger and provide a more robust tool to help improve patients' health. 

Emily begins by discussing her attendance at the American Society for Preventive Cardiology meeting in Boston the previous weekend, where Dr. Christos Montzoros presented a talk proposing that the liver's role in cardiovascular diseases is "equally critical" compared to the kidney and other multi-metabolic co-morbidities. Dr. Montzoros closed his talk by stating that the CKM syndrome description should be changed to CKLM to reflect the importance of the liver, and that the CKLM patient scoring and criteria should reflect this as well.

Next, Emily describes the 0-to-4 scoring system that the CKM initiative has chosen to use and the recommendations that accompany the scoring system itself. The system does not neatly overlay the 4-point fibrosis scoring system or the NAS score, but Emily describes how these might be incorporated into the CKM score. 

The conversation shifts to focus on patient management. Since the original CKM paper was published in 2023, resmetirom had not yet been approved and the paper itself focused more on screening than on treatment. To Emily, adding the "L" to CKM would entail adding resmetirom to treatment protocols as appropriate, and also considering drug combinations that addressed liver disease. Louise takes this issue from the other side, suggesting that every time a provider prescribes a drug to a CKM patient, the potential for negative liver effects should be part of the selection process. Emily and Louise agree that providers and patients should take a holistic approach to therapy for these patients. One benefit: even if a patient has multiple organs affected by multi-metabolic challenges, the provider can educate the patient that there is a single target disease to treat instead of multiple different diseases. As Roger notes, treating 4-5 discrete diseases simultaneously sounds overwhelming, while treating one overarching disease sounds far more manageable.

The conversation ends with a focus on whether we are correctly identifying high-risk cardiovascular patients in the current environment, and how this more holistic focus might improve patient screening and identification.