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Dr. Nabil El-Sherif directs the cardiology division at the VA New York Harbor Healthcare System's Brooklyn Campus. (Photo by Claudie Benjamin)
Dr. Nabil El-Sherif, director of the cardiology division at the Brooklyn campus of VA's New York Harbor Healthcare System, received the American College of Cardiology's prestigious Distinguished Science Award for 2016.
The award was presented to El-Sherif in recognition of his translational research on heart arrhythmias, which has improved the management of cardiac rhythm disorders in two main groups of patients.
The first group consists of those who experience palpitations, dizziness, or fatigue, along with other non-life threatening symptoms. These symptoms are usually caused by various forms of irregular heartbeats, and are cured in almost all cases by a relatively non-invasive procedure developed by El-Sharif and others called transcatheter radiofrequency ablation.
The second group consists of patients with more serious rhythm disorders that may result in death. El-Sharif discovered that some of these potentially lethal arrhythmias were due to an electrical mechanism he called the "figure-of-eight-model of reentry."
This mechanism helped pinpoint the best site from which the problem could be eliminated, either by surgery or through a procedure called electrode catheter ablation.
El-Sharif's current research focuses on identifying which patients in this group are at highest risk, so that internal defibrillators can be implanted in time to save these patients' lives.