E34: Zanfina Ademi

So Professor Ademi, you're a health economist at Monash University, quite different from our usual clinical and atherosclerotic researchers here on Atherotalk.

What drew you to this unique journey in health economics? Could you walk us through your academic path and what led you to focus on cardiovascular disease prevention, dyslipidemia and LP little a through an economic and epidemiological lens?

So I started as a pharmacist in Albania.

And so obviously my training is in Albania.

Then I went back to Kosovo.

And after a year or two, I became increasingly interested in prevention, access, and affordability.

And that coincided with 2003, at that time when I finished my pharmacy degree.

And there was a lot of rebuilding in Kosovo after the war, so I got the opportunity to be able to connect with a lot of people who were working in Ministry of Health and also World Health Organization.

So I became quite interested to understand a bigger picture and I think it's not enough just to look at whether intervention works clinically.

We need to understand whether it's affordable, sustainable and equitable and whether health system can realistically implement those interventions and also sometimes we have to think about whether it's culturally feasible as well and especially when I talk to my students I always talk about cultural perception of health technologies to be implemented in our healthcare system, but not all people will think similarly in the same way if we would like to implement something in our healthcare.

So my work in cardiovascular disease, in prevention, familiar hypercholesterolemia, genomics, and now recently with lipoprotein A, all emerge from that broader question around prevention and implementation.