Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists: Judith Hochman
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Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists: Judith Hochman

E. Magnus Ohman, MD; Judith S. Hochman, MD

Disclosures

October 29, 2015

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Early Childhood and Influences

E. Magnus Ohman, MD: Hello. I'm Magnus Ohman from Duke University in North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of the Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists. I'm very fortunate today to have my guest and friend, Dr Judith Hochman, who is the Harold Snyder Family Professor of Cardiology and Senior Associate Dean of Clinical Sciences at New York University School of Medicine in New York City.

I think most of the people who have interacted with you have realized that you've taken on the hardest clinical trials in medicine—the SHOCK trial,[1] the Occluded Artery Trial (OAT),[2] and now the ISCHEMIA trial. How did the endurance for these difficult trials arise?

Judith S. Hochman, MD: I have to go back to my childhood. First of all, I was very motivated to make a difference, and that goes back to an early age. We can psychoanalyze why that was, but in tenth grade, a biology teacher completely turned me on to science. His name was Mr Blank. We had an experimental curriculum on molecular biology, which was brand new back then. I said I wanted to be a research scientist. I did not go straight to medical school. I was actually in a PhD program before I went to medical school. I was going to cure cancer. I was going to do something very big, and that goal began in high school.

Dr Ohman: That's amazing. One teacher in high school turned this on. Tell me a little bit about your family. Are there any scientists in the family?

Dr Hochman: My father was a commercial chemist, making things like paints, inks, and glues. He became a chemist because he couldn't become a doctor. There were quotas back in the 1930s for allowing Jews in medical school, and he couldn't get into medical school in New York. He wasn't able to go outside of New York because of his very humble family upbringing.

My father was one of those parents that if you came home with a 98% on your report card, he asked what happened to the other two points. So, he was very much a motivator to always do better. My mother was also a big influence. She had a very strong sense of justice, about what was right and wrong and the need to make the world better, and that was passed on to me.

Dr Ohman: Fascinating. Were you the only child?

Dr Hochman: No, I had three older siblings. I'm the youngest, and I would say that was another motivator. They were all brilliant, very successful, and as the fourth child, I always felt like I would never measure up.

It's very funny. I grew up with this notion that fourth children were failures. So, I was extremely motivated to disprove that and to live up to my siblings who are all very successful. I became very tenacious and stuck with things no matter how hard they were. I think there's a lot in my childhood and upbringing that motivated me to do what I do.

Dr Ohman: I can see how some of those tenacious aspects have carried over to the clinical trials that we will discuss later.

I didn't realize that there were medical school quotas for Jews in New York City. Did this make you feel that if you didn't do well, you'd let your parents down?

Dr Hochman: The fact that my father couldn't be a doctor was definitely a part of it. It's interesting because I didn't go straight to medical school, and my siblings are not physicians either. But I think that did influence me—the fact that he had been thwarted. The discrimination was a motivator.

From Basic Science Research to Clinical Medicine

Dr Ohman: Where did you go after high school?

Dr Hochman: I went to Brandeis for college and then I went to Harvard graduate school and then Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Ohman: What did you do at Brandeis? What was your specialty?

Dr. Hochman: I was a biology major. Biochemistry and molecular biology.

Dr. Ohman: So, really going after your father. Almost identical.

Dr. Hochman: Yes. He was a chemist and I was a biochemist sort of. Molecular biologist.

Dr. Ohman: Fascinating. And then, graduate school at Harvard.

Dr Hochman: Studying cellular and developmental biology. My plan was to be a great basic research scientist and find a cure for something. That was my vision.

Dr Ohman: What made you switch to medicine from being in the molecular world?

Dr Hochman: Life is not only about big accomplishments. It's about the day to day—is your day-to-day work satisfying to you? I wanted more human interaction. Being in a lab, you interact with your colleagues and other graduate students and the professor, but working with test tubes is not the same as working with people.

It became clear to me that based on my personality and what satisfies me, I needed to do something more clinical. Hence, I went to medical school at Harvard. I was very fortunate that they took me. And then my path brought me to clinical research, which was the perfect combination of being a research scientist and working with patients directly.

I was able to combine the two, where I would feel satisfied based on hopefully large accomplishments but also the day to day.

Learning From the "Giants" at Harvard

Dr Ohman: How was Harvard Medical School? Was it as competitive as everybody says?

Dr Hochman: It was competitive, but there were some giants that you just learned a tremendous amount from and looked up to. Lewis "Lew" Dexter was one of those giants. He was an absolutely master clinician, and I learned the physical exam and cardiac exam from him.

Although it was competitive, the other students were often very supportive and collegial. Just the exposure to great physicians like Lew was very influential. As a medical student, Joseph "Joe" Alpert was head of the cardiac care unit (CCU). Eugene "Gene" Braunwald was the chair of the Department of Medicine, and I became an internal medicine resident under him, so he became a larger influence after medical school.

Dr Ohman: These early "clinical giants" were important. What happened during residency?

Dr Hochman: I was at Brigham. I was house officer and, of course, that was an incredible experience. The first day, I started in the CCU, and Dr Braunwald had one of his own patients in the CCU, which wasn't that common as he didn't admit that many patients under his name. He was chair of medicine and had a lot on his plate. But he had a patient in cardiogenic shock. And I was picking up this patient, and I would get frequent calls.

"Hello? It's Dr Braunwald." He wanted to know what the urine output was. He wanted to know all kinds of parameters. And, of course, that was quite a petrifying experience for a young, first-day intern.

Dr Braunwald had very high standards. He was certainly the kind of mentor and leader and chairman of the department that would make you strive to do better when you're a resident. He was tremendous.

Dr Ohman: He was very attentive to details, which is obviously asking all the right questions.

Dr Hochman: Absolutely. What I don't think people realize is that it takes not only asking great questions or knowing the bigger picture, but you really need to pay attention to the details, whether it's at the patient's bedside or in a clinical trial. Gene Braunwald was exemplary at that.

Dr Ohman: Your first clinical experience is very similar to my own on a cardiology rotation. Did you feel hopeless?

Dr. Hochman: At that time, we were enrolling in the Multicenter Investigation of Limitation of Infarct Size (MILIS) trial.[3] Intravenous hyaluronidase was one of the arms—there was no reperfusion, no percutaneous coronary intervention, no lytic agents. We did have balloon pumps. It was discouraging because the mortality rates were so much higher than they are now. But, on the other hand, it was motivating to make a difference, to make things better. The fact that I got exposed to research so early on in the CCU was probably highly influential in terms of an academic investigation path.

Dr Ohman: At the time, as I recall, there were only a handful of CCUs in the country randomizing patients in clinical trials.

Dr Hochman: Right. Brigham was one of those CCUs, so I was very fortunate to be there.

Choosing Cardiology and Influences at Johns Hopkins

Dr Ohman: Now you're a resident doing general internal medicine having to report to Dr Braunwald every day. Did you realize at this time that you wanted to be a cardiologist, or did it take a little bit longer?

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