Ragavendra R Baliga

Ragavendra R Baliga, MBBS, M.D, MBA, FACC, FACP, FRCP (Edin) is a Professor of Medicine, The Ohio State University School of Medicine, Columbus, Ohio. He is a consulting editor of Heart Failure Clinics of North America, an indexed medical journal along with James B. Young, MD, Executive Dean, Lerner College of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio. This is journal is known for editorials championing novel and esoteric mechanisms pertaining to cardiac function including ‘The Heart as the Concertina Pump’ and suggesting that stiffness of the great arteries contribute to cardiorenal syndrome. The most provocative editorial is a recent one that discusses the role of implantable cardiac defibrillators in sudden death. He is also Vice-Chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, at The Ohio State University of Medical Center.

Using pioneering positron emission tomography technqiues at the MRC Cyclotron Center at Hammersmith Hospital, London along with Prof J.S. Kooner, Dr Stuart Rosen and Prof Paulo Camici, he demonstrated that angina occurring after a meal is due to intramyocardial ‘steal’ wherein blood is redistributed from ischemic areas of the myocardium to the normally supplied myocardial in order to maintain overall myocardial blood flow. This important mechanistic paper was published in the premier journal Circulation. Another paper published in the American Journal of Cardiology investigating the role of meal components showed that the carbohydrates contribute significantly to the pathogenesis of post-prandial angina. He also worked with Prof Christopher Mathias, FRCP, St. Mary’s Medical School and Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine and Prof Hans L. Frankel, FRCP, National Spinal Injuries Center, Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Ayelsbury.

While at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School he worked with Thomas Woodward Smith, MD Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Ralph A Kelly, MD. At that time he worked as a part of a team to tease out the intracellular cell signaling pathways in response to a paracrine growth factor Neuregulin-1 in the cardiac myocyte. This research shed light on the effects of trastuzumab/Herceptin (a medication used in the treatment of breast cancer) on the heart and was published in the American Journal of Physiology and Journal of Biochemistry.

Baliga has written or edited several books (partial list below), however, he is best known worldwide for his book 250 Cases in Clinical Medicine, initially published by Balliere Tindall as 200 Cases in Clinical Medicine in June 1993, and later by W.B. Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier. He wrote this book at the age of 32. The book to this day remains popular among medical students in the UK, Middle East and Australasia to this day. His subsequent books include Self-assessment in Clinical Medicine, Saunders, although in its 3rd edition and 500 MCQs for the MRCP Part I, 1997 also by Saunders. A more recent book Practical Cardiology, which he co-edits with Kim A Eagle, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine at University of Michigan and published by Lippincott, Wilkins an imprint of Wolter Kluwers is more popular.