EN
Prof. Dr med. Heribert Schunkert (Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Heribert Schunkert) is Director of the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases and Medical Director of the German Heart Centre in Munich. Patients come to him with coronary heart disease, after a heart attack and with high blood pressure, especially when heart disease runs in the family and they want to know how great the inherited risk really is.
Where the doctor practises and what they do
Prof. Schunkert has headed the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases at the German Heart Centre in Munich since 2012; he is also the centre’s medical director and full professor at the Technical University of Munich. His scientific and clinical interests centre on the molecular biology and genetics of heart disease: he studies which inherited traits raise the risk of a heart attack, and he coordinated the European research projects Cardiogenics and CVgenes@target as well as the German projects Atherogenomics and e:Athero-MED on the genetics of atherosclerosis.
His second field is the regulation of heart muscle growth, that is, the mechanisms by which the heart thickens under high blood pressure and weakens over time. The third is the epidemiology and organisation of care for hypertension and coronary heart disease (narrowing of the arteries that supply the heart muscle): how to detect and treat these conditions across large groups of patients. For a patient this means that family history and genetic factors are taken into account, not only today’s test results. You can read more about cardiology in Germany and atherosclerosis treatment on our pages.
What they are known for
Heribert Schunkert began at RWTH Aachen University, where he was a research assistant at the Department of Internal Medicine II from 1985 to 1988. From 1988 to 1991 he worked in Boston as a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and as clinical fellow and instructor in medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School, and in 1996 and 1997 he was a fellow in interventional cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. From 1994 to 2002 he was senior and then head senior physician at the Department of Internal Medicine II of the University of Regensburg (C3 professorship), and from 2003 to 2012 director of the Department of Medicine II at the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein in Lübeck (C4 chair). He is the author of more than 700 publications in international journals, received the Arthur Weber Prize of the German Cardiac Society (2001) and a Heisenberg fellowship of the German Research Foundation (1995), sits on the editorial boards of the European Heart Journal and Circulation Cardiovascular Genetics, and is a member of the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), of the board of the German Cardiac Society and of the supervisory board of the University Hospital Regensburg.
How we arrange an appointment
AlenMed arranges consultations and treatment with Prof. Schunkert. You send us an enquiry with the reports, ECG, coronary angiography and laboratory results you already have; we translate them into German and agree an appointment at the German Heart Centre in Munich. A medical interpreter accompanies you at the appointment and during any hospital stay, and we help with the visa, airport pick-up and accommodation near the clinic if needed. Diagnostics and treatment are paid directly to the clinic at its official tariffs.
This material is provided for informational purposes only and does not replace a doctor’s consultation. The possibility and results of treatment are determined after an in-person examination.