Upendra Kaul, Jagdish C. Mohan
AsiaIntervention, a journal for our region, is a newcomer attempting to find a space in this wide area of readership, with so many established journals already being available. One of our objectives as editors is to make the readership aware of the developments which have occurred during the last four decades in countries of this region, which is the home for more than two thirds of mankind. Keeping this goal in mind, I thought of appraising our valued readers regarding the interventional cardiology scene in India.
Interventional cardiology, which is a subspeciality dealing with catheter-based treatment of structural heart disease, was conceptualised by Charles Dotter in 1964 and kick-started by Andreas Gruentzig more than a decade later. Soon after the pioneering work of Charles Dotter in peripheral artery dilatation, in 1966 Rashkind and Miller described a non-surgical procedure to create an atrial septal defect, using a balloon catheter in patients with transposition of the great vessels.