Abbas completed his undergraduate medical training at Imperial College London in 2002, including an intercalated BSc in Neuroscience. He worked in New Zealand for a year before gaining membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 2006, and a National Training Number in Cardiology in 2007.
He was a CRY Clinical Research Fellow from 2010-2013, under the supervision of Professor Sanjay Sharma. He has screened over five thousand young individuals for latent cardiac disorders (athletes and general population), and has been responsible for the assessment of patients in the CRY Centre for Inherited Cardiac Diseases and Sports Cardiology at St George’s Hospital, London. He is experienced in the diagnosis, risk stratification, and management of primary cardiomyopathies, ion channel disorders, and cardiac diseases in athletes.
During his time at St George’s, Abbas conducted research into the athlete’s heart, leading to the award of an MD degree in 2014. He undertook a period of training in cardiac MRI in the Netherlands in 2012, leading to collaborative research publications relating to the athlete’s heart, left ventricular non-compaction, and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. His work has however focused primarily on athletic adaptation of the right ventricle, on which he has published first-author original research articles in leading journals such as Circulation and European Heart Journal. His work was featured at the 2014 American Heart Association Annual Conference in the session ‘Groundbreaking Studies in the Practice of Cardiovascular Medicine: Circulation Editors’ Choices’.
He is a member of the Research and Audit Committee of the British Society of Echocardiography, for whom he has authored protocols for the Echocardiographic assessment of Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy, and Preparticipation Screening for Inherited Cardiac Diseases. He has been an invited lecturer at several major meetings including the British Cardiovascular Society and EuroPrevent. He was a finalist in the Young Investigator Awards at the British Society of Echocardiography (2010) and EuroPrevent (2011), winner of the BHF/BCS Prize for Congenital Heart Disease (2012), winner of the Peter Hinchliffe Award for the most outstanding CRY research fellow (2012), and winner of the Ian Williams Prize at the Welsh Cardiovascular Society (2013).
Abbas is currently back in programme as a cardiac imaging fellow in Wales. His long-term objective is to contribute to the development of services for cardiovascular imaging, inherited heart diseases, screening, and sports cardiology in Wales. Outside work, Abbas enjoys keep-fit and running, having completed the London Marathon for HeartUK.
