Message from the Organizing and Scientific Committees

It is with great pleasure that we extend to you our warmest invitation to the 6th Congress of the Asian Pacific Society of Atherosclerosis and Vascular Diseases (APSAVD) and 10th Hong Kong Diabetes and Cardiovascular Risk Factors East Meets West Symposium.

The theme of this year’s meeting is Combating Cardiovascular Diseases through Collaborative Care. The collective disease burden of diabetes, obesity, atherosclerosis and cardio-renal complications is colossal. These chronic diseases often coexist and share overlapping risk factors, which interact in a multiplicative and complex manner to give rise to multi-organ failure.

In our pursuit of solutions to overcome these challenges, intersectoral and interdisciplinary efforts are needed to improve our understanding of the underlying causes, translate effective treatment strategies into practice, and to hypothesize and test alternative solutions to meet the many unmet needs of these subjects.

It is against this background that the all-important joining of the APSAVD Regional Congress and East Meets West Annual Symposium meets our common goal in striving to provide a prominent platform for researchers in the basic and clinical sciences. We also welcome our allied professionals, healthcare workers, administrators and policy makers to network, debate and deliberate in search of solutions.

We are extremely honoured to have a world-class faculty joining us to cover the latest advances and controversies in basic science, including the genetics of diabetes and related diseases, the roles of mitochondria, and ER stress and gut-liver-brain axis in energy metabolism. Meanwhile, clinical practice topics include primary prevention through changes in policy and system, defining optimal targets for risk factor control, lessons learnt from the latest landmark studies and our aspirations for cellular replacement therapy.

While we look forward to these state-of the art lectures from leading experts, we have reserved a special Best Paper Symposium for our upcoming, young scientists and clinical researchers to share with us their work and insights.

At the heart of the APSAVD Congress & East Meets West Symposium is the spirit of collaboration and of coming together. We truly value the intellectual and social exchanges with our colleagues from home and abroad, from related disciplines and from all parties interested to contribute, in whatever capacity, to advance our knowledge in these areas.

This year, we expect to welcome more than 1,000 colleagues to Hong Kong, a place where East really does meets West, and we look forward to your participation to make this truly a meeting for the people with, and at risk of, these chronic conditions.