Chairmen’s Foreword: beta-blockade across the cardiovascular continuum—when and where to use?

‘Beta-blockade across the cardiovascular continuum: when and where to use? ’ was the title of a satellite symposium held on 1 Sep-tember 2008, during the annual congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in Munich, Germany, and sponsored by Merck Serono. The term ‘cardiovascular continuum ’ was first coined by Dzau and Braunwald in 1991 to describe a new paradigm for car-diovascular diseases.1 The concept of a continuum is based on the idea that cardiovascular conditions such as angina pectoris, myo-cardial infarction (MI), and chronic heart failure (CHF) are late complications in a progressive pathogenic process. This interlinked chain of events starts with a variety of cardiovascular risk factors and continues for decades. The cardiovascular continuum is one of the most important causes of premature death and disability in our society, but its pro-gression is far from inevitable. In recent decades, an improve