Alan T. Hirsch MD

Alan T. Hirsch, M.D. is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Community Health in the Cardiovascular Division, University of Minnesota Medical School and at the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, School of Public Health. 

Dr. Hirsch has served as pioneer in the field of vascular medicine, creating links that extend from vascular biology to development of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for vascular disease. His work extends from vascular health (prevention) to vascular disease (treatment) in an approach that has been actively applied in over 30 years of clinical care, bedside practice, and clinical research, and in over 250 peer-reviewed original manuscripts and chapters. 

Dr. Hirsch received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and attended medical school at the University of California in San Francisco. He completed his internship and residency in the department of medicine at the University of Chicago Hospitals and at the University of California Hospitals in San Francisco. Dr. Hirsch also completed a cardiovascular pharmacology research fellowship at the Cardiovascular Research Institute and Clinical Pharmacology Section, University of California in San Francisco; and a physiology fellowship at the Department of Physiology and Molecular Biology, Harvard Medical School. His cardiovascular fellowship was completed at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School; and vascular medicine training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA.

Specific research interests include the evaluation of new pharmacotherapeutic, lifestyle and cell therapy approaches to peripheral arterial disease (PAD); evaluation of methods of community-based vascular disease detection; and methods to improve venous and lymphatic disease population-based outcomes. He serves as principal investigator for the design of single-site and multi-center clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of medical treatments for vascular disorders. He was the chair of the PARTNERS database; served on the USA steering committee of the international REACH Registry; and recently chaired the NHLBI-sponsored CLEVER trial that evaluated the benefit, risk and health economics (comparative effectiveness) of exercise, medical, and stent therapies for individuals with PAD and claudication.  He evaluates stem cell approaches to treatment of individuals with claudication and critical limb ischemia; and leads a State of Minnesota program to disseminate community-based primary prevention of cardiovascular disease interventions (the Minnesota Heart Health Program).

Dr. Hirsch has provided leadership to a wide array of professional healthcare associations. He has served as founding member and Past-President of the Society for Vascular Medicine; is a Fellow of the American Heart Association (AHA) Council on Epidemiology and Prevention, and Steering Committee member of the new AHA Council on Peripheral Vascular Disease. He chaired the intersocietal Writing Committee which published the 2006 “ACC-AHA Guidelines for the Management of Patients with Peripheral Arterial Disease” and its 2011 Update. As founding President of the non-profit Vascular Disease Foundation, and founding chair of its “Peripheral Arterial Disease Coalition”, he lead the development of the first national “PAD Public Awareness Campaign” with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in September, 2006.  In 2009, he co-published the first book for patients with or at risk for PAD, and their families entitled, “100 Questions and Answers About Peripheral Artery Disease”, by Jones and Bartlett, publishers.