This has been the year of government vascular strategies, official NICE guidance on FH and campaigns to encourage the nation towards healthy eating. All laudable achievements but what if high risk patients are still slipping through the net?

To find out if this is really the case HEART UK is creating its own unique courtroom at Hope University, Liverpool, to put current strategies on trial. Dr Sarah Jarvis is Chief Prosecutor, arguing that by following a “fire and forget statin policy some higher risk patients will not achieve adequate long-term control of lipid risk factors”. She is ably backed up by “expert witness” Dr Chris Packard from Glasgow. However the defence is equally formidable, featuring Dr Mark Davis and Dr John Reckless. Sitting in judgement on this unique event will be Professor John Betteridge, who will, of course expect order at all times from both counsel and jury – the delegates.

Although this may be a fun approach, the arguments are deadly serious and will set many minds thinking. There will already have been plenty of food for thought though as delegates will have heard Professor James Shepherd from Glasgow Infirmary present the Myant Lecture and ask whether the lipid hypothesis has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.

Clinical trials also feature heavily in this year’s conference. Dr Roberto Marchioli from Mario Negri Sud Pharmacological Research Institute in Italy will be talking on Hard Clinical Outcomes – The Gold Standard, where he will be calling for clinical trials to be tailored to the pathophysiology of the disease in question and its frequency in the population. Meanwhile, Professor Colin Baigent of the Clinical Trial Service Unit will look at the Meta-Analysis of Clinical Trials and his colleague Professor Rory Collins will be asking if clinical trials matter.

The conference timetable will also take a look at a subject that has been popular in the media in recent months. Professor Tom Saunders from King’s College, London, will be taking a close look at the evidence for the cardioprotective effect of omega-3 fatty acids. Another speaker unearthing cardioprotective fact from fiction is Lucy Aphramor, winner of HEART UK’s Travel Scholarship in 2008. She will be presenting a paper on Health at Every Size (HAES), which looks at cardioprotective measures as opposed to the more traditional weight loss programmes. HAES may not be common practise here, but results that Lucy has seen in her travels in Scandinavia and Iceland have led her to be a passionate pioneer of HAES in the UK.

In addition to an impressive array of speakers and subjects, the conference also boasts some thought provoking abstracts too. One of these features the remarkable success of a Danish study led by Professor Henning Bliddal from the Parker Arthritis Institute, in Copenhagen, which has proved that an effective weight loss of just two stones can reduce blood pressure to near normal in middle-aged, relatively inactive, arthritic Danes.

Finally HEART UK is using the conference as the perfect platform to launch its FH Guideline Implementation Toolkit. The charity’s FH Guideline Implementation Team (FH GIT) have been working on this toolkit to support the implementation of the recent NICE FH guidance, and Dr Dermot Neely and Dr Jonathan Morrell will reveal what is inside this toolkit as the finale of the 23rd annual HEART UK conference.

For further programme details please contact Diana Butler at HEART UK on 07876 452170 or at email her at

For further information contact HEART UK on the helpline - 0845 450 5988, or visit www.heartuk.org.uk