Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio
Professor Emanuele Di Angelantonio trained as a physician in cardiovascular medicine at the University of Rome “Sapienza” and at the “Hopital Saint Antoine” in Paris. After completing his specialist training, he gained an MSc in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. He was elected as Fellow of The Royal College of Physician (London), the European Society of Cardiology, and the American Heart Association over the last several years. Since 2018, he is a Professor in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge.
Professor Di Angelantonio has contributed significantly to improvements in healthcare related to prevention of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and his work has helped resolve important clinical and public health controversies through its combination of powerful, systematic, and detailed analysis of prospective epidemiological data on CVD risk factors.
For example, he has demonstrated that lipid assessment can be greatly simplified by measurement of HDL-cholesterol and total cholesterol without the need to fast and without regard to triglyceride, with implications for millions of adults screened by health services. He has shown that diabetes and dysglycaemia are independently associated with premature death from a range of vascular and non-vascular conditions and that people with cardiometabolic multimorbidity (i.e., a history of diabetes, stroke, and myocardial infarction) at the age of 60 years live about 15 years less than counterparts without cardiometabolic multimorbidity, strengthening the epidemiological basis to diabetes prevention programmes.
Professor Di Angelantonio has also shown that, in contrast with previous suggestions, general adiposity and central adiposity are similarly important to cardiovascular risk, but add little incremental value to risk prediction in developed countries when additional information is available for systolic blood pressure, history of diabetes, and lipids. Furthermore, in an international study of ~10 million participants across 32 countries in four continents, he has shown that overweight and obesity are unequivocally associated with higher mortality worldwide, challenging previous claims, and supporting guidelines to combat globally the entire spectrum of excess adiposity.
More recently, Professor Di Angelantonio has led establishment of population resources capable of providing both pragmatic results to guide practice and supporting discovery science to yield aetiological insights.
Over several years, Professor Di Angelantonio has engaged extensively with various bodies (eg, World Health Organization, European Society of Cardiology) to help shape CVD risk management guidelines, and his work on risk factors and risk prediction strategies has heavily influenced risk management, and has been cited by several guidelines published in recent years.
The Award was handed-over at the occasion of the closing session at EuroPrevent 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Our mission: To reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease.