Special Populations & Cross-Specialty

Patients in whom standard cardiac guidance fits badly. This section covers cardiovascular disease in women, including presentations still missed in emergency departments, the frail and elderly patient in whom every drug carries a trade-off, and cardiac problems encountered by colleagues in other specialties who did not expect to manage them. It is intended for clinicians who must adapt rather than apply a guideline, often without a subspecialty opinion available. Representative volumes are The Gynecologist’s Guide to Cardiology in Women and Cardiology for the Elderly. Congenital survivors are covered in Paediatric Cardiology.
The patients the trials excludedSpecial populations and cross-specialty titles cover the patients for whom the guideline population is a poor match: the pregnant woman whose physiology mimics disease, the adult with a congenital repair now failing decades later, the frail older patient with competing risk, the woman whose ischaemic presentation is under-recognised, the patient with cardiac involvement of a systemic autoimmune disease. Alongside these sit the cross-specialty titles written for physicians, intensivists, anaesthetists, nephrologists, obstetricians and surgeons who inherit a cardiac problem without inheriting a cardiologist — framed throughout around the referral decision, what can safely be started before the opinion arrives, and what genuinely cannot wait.