Matthew Solomon, MD, PhD, FACC
“We built the largest database in the world for patients with aortic aneurysms so that we could help patients make the best decisions about when to perform open heart surgery.”
When cardiologist Matthew Solomon, MD, PhD, FACC, joined KP Oakland more than a decade ago, he started seeing numerous patients with ascending thoracic aortic aneurism, or TAA, a bulge and weakening of the body’s largest and most important artery.
“It became clear very quickly that there was a huge lack of evidence in how to best take care of these patients,” Dr. Solomon says. “The data was based on a few hundred patients, and I knew that we had thousands in our system.”
Appointed to the KP Northern California Division of Research’s Physician-Researcher Program, Dr. Solomon commenced the largest study ever conducted on TAA, to help resolve controversy among cardiologists and surgeons over when open-heart surgery was necessary to protect patients from life-threatening aortic tears.
“Dr. Solomon is passionate about creating new avenues of learning, about research that advances our field,” says Rita Ng, MD, FACC, cardiologist and physician-in-chief of KP Oakland.
The study reviewed the cases of 6,400 TAA patients in KP Northern California between 2000 and 2016 and found that those with an aorta measuring 6 centimeters or larger were at significantly higher risk of tears than those with smaller aortas.
The results were published in JAMA Cardiology in 2022 with Dr. Solomon as lead author and numerous co-authors affiliated with the KP Northern California Center for Thoracic Aortic Disease and Division of Research.
“Dr. Solomon and his team have done an exceptional amount of work,” says John W. Morehouse, MD, FACEP, CPPS, physician-in-chief of KP Richmond. “The careful, collaborative effort of many hundreds of people over many years yielded these important results.”
The practice-changing study supports current cardiology guidelines, which recommend surgery to correct TAAs primarily in patients with aortas 5.5 centimeters or larger. “Patients weren’t able to feel confident about how safe it was to be observed versus how safe it was to have surgery,” says Betty J. Suh-Burgmann, MD, chair of the TPMG Central Research Committee. “Dr. Solomon’s study shows that for patients with smaller aneurysms, observation is very safe.”