Aortic Dissection Awareness Day 2025 UK - Leicester
Hosting of the 10th annual Aortic Dissection Awareness Day UK, on Thursday 18th September 2025, is awarded by the national patient charity to the University of Leicester. Please continue reading for our draft Programme for the day…
Event Details
Tickets - there are some rules, please read them before booking
This is a fully ticketed event and is reserved for eligible participants only.
Admission only by an original, valid Eventbrite® ticket. No copies, scans or duplicates. Tickets are not transferrable. One ticket per person. Eligibility is at the sole discretion of the organisers.
Please ONLY book for yourself (+/- family member or supporter). No third-party or block bookings.
Patient eligibility: Thoracic Aorta Disease patient (i.e. Thoracic Aortic Dissection or Aneurysm or syndrome). Each Patient may be accompanied by ONE Family member or supporter. This requires TWO tickets.
Healthcare workers eligibility: Employed in healthcare (i.e. not students) and interested in Thoracic Aortic Dissection (or Aneurysms or syndromes). Medical students who would like to attend, should inquire by email only, to hello@aorticdissectionawareness.org AFTER 1st July 2025.
Researchers: We welcome researchers with relevant interests. Please inquire by email only, to hello@aorticdissectionawareness.org …no date restriction.
Cost of tickets
There is no charge for attending and participating in this event. However, the actual cost (venue, catering, other costs) is somewhat over £50 per person. So, please try to avoid late cancellation or (still worse) simply not turning up. This event is usually fully booked. A casual ‘no-show’ is thoughtless, expensive, and denies a place to somebody else.
Badges
All delegates and guests will receive a name badge at the registration desk. Please wear your badge at all times.
Catering facilities
The catering stations for the coffee and lunch breaks are located in the Main Hall. Coffee breaks and lunch buffets are included in your registration.
Venue
St Martin’s House
7 Peacock Lane
Leicester
LE1 5PZ
Disclaimer
The organisers cannot be held liable for any hindrance or disruption of congress proceedings arising from political, social or economic events or any other unforeseen incidents beyond their control. The organisers will accept no liability for any personal injuries sustained or for loss or damage to property belonging to congress participants, either during or as a result of the congress or during all events. Registration of a participant entails acceptance of these conditions.
Helpful telephone numbers
- Police: (national) 999
- Fire: (national) 999
- Ambulance: (national) 999
- Uber services are available
How to get to St Martin’s House
www.stmartinshouse.com/contact-us/how-to-find-us
Accommodation
www.stmartinshouse.com/our-venue/bedrooms
There are a limited amount of spaces here, you must book by phone and say the rooms are for the Aortic Dissection Awareness day.
Your booking and contract is solely with St Martin’s house, and subject to their terms and conditions including cancellation.
Provisional Programme
A Special Year
Most of us will be aware, often through personal experience, that Thoracic Aorta Disease often runs in families – it has, at least for some, a strong genetic background.
As we learn more about genetics in general, and the genetics of Thoracic Aorta Disease in particular, we turn up some important, and complicated, questions.
Who should be offered genetic testing? Who should have screening scans? Should we screen siblings? Children? Other relatives? Everyone? What are the implications and pitfalls of doing this?
Aortic Dissection Family Screening: The DECIDE-TAD Programme
DECIDE-TAD is our NIHR-funded strategic research partnership with the University of Leicester, looking at preventing Aortic Dissection through the screening of 1st and 2nd degree relatives of people who have the disease.
The aims of the programme are to design a tool to help people at risk of Thoracic Aortic Disease decide if they want to participate in screening; to develop a screening, monitoring and treatment pathway for those who do; to evaluate this pathway to provide evidence that it works; then to implement it as a part of standard NHS care.
The programme evolved from our 2019 Aortic Dissection Awareness Day UK conference, held in Leicester, which was a large-scale Patient & Public Involvement event attended by 160 patients, relatives, clinicians and researchers. Our Chair, aortic dissection survivor Gareth Owens, co-leads the programme with Prof. Gavin Murphy, BHF Chair of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Leicester. This is a true research partnership. A team of patients and relatives from our national patient charity contributes to every aspect of the research, co-creating all plans, designs and outputs, advising on PPI and EDI matters, conducting some of the research and disseminating the results. The DECIDE-TAD programme is supported by our THINK AORTA, THINK FAMILY campaign.
The first phase of the programme received an NIHR Programme Development Grant and completed in mid-2023. We are delighted as a result of this work to have been shortlisted and invited by NIHR to submit an application for a Phase 2 Programme Grant for Applied Research (PGfAR) for the full DECIDE-TAD programme. To date, 24 of the 29 cardiac surgery centres in the UK have expressed interest in being a part of DECIDE-TAD. Together with the partnership between researchers and our national patient charity, this means that the DECIDE-TAD programme is well-placed to deliver national change in care pathways which benefits TAD patients and their family members at risk of the disease.
Over 200 of our members have been involved in the DECIDE-TAD research to date. Our charity's patient engagement in the programme is led by a core team of five PPI partners: Gareth Owens, Haleema Saadia, Mark Lewis, Lisa Skinner and Anne Cotton, supported by our Head of Research, Gordon McManus.
This year, genetics in general and the DECIDE-TAD research project are an important part of our conference.
Our researchers need your help...everybody, not just patients...
We aren’t going to use you for experiments.
We aren’t going to collect your personal medical history, your blood or your data...
We are going to ask you to help – by thinking about how you feel about genetic testing and screening for patients and their families. We’ll do this in some workshops which are built into the programme.
Not just genetics—don’t worry, there’s plenty of other stuff in the programme as well. So, book your place and join us in September...