Vanderbilt One of Four Major Institutions Named
The American Heart Association recently announced four major institutions would band together in a new research network aimed at preventing heart disease and stroke. The Strategically Focused Prevention Research Network Centers — funded by a $15 million AHA grant — is designed to help people live longer, healthier lives.
Obesity, high blood pressure and heart failure are among the areas being studied by the collaborative network, which is made up of investigators at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Northwestern University in Chicago, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
“The best way to reduce premature mortality from cardiovascular diseases and stroke is to prevent the development of the risk factors that lead to these conditions,” said AHA President Elliott Antman, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior physician in the cardiovascular division of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Scientists working in these research centers are helping to discover the mechanisms that will allow all Americans to live healthier lives, helping lead us to a culture of health.”
The concept is critical to the association’s goal to improve the cardiovascular health of all Americans by 20 percent while reducing deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 20 percent by 2020.
Two major hurdles — an overly salty diet and the frequent need to take multiple, expensive medications — is spurring Vanderbilt University to develop new approaches for preventing high blood pressure. The goals are to understand how salt causes tissue injury, develop a method to detect and lower excess salt, and determine if a simple treatment in one pill could improve cardiovascular health.
That’s an “enormous opportunity,” said Vanderbilt’s David G. Harrison, MD, the Betty and Jack Bailey Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology and director of the division of Clinical Pharmacology. “Our center will focus on preventing hypertension, which is an enormous risk factor for heart disease, stroke and kidney disease. We are beginning to understand how common risk factors like diet and lifestyle predispose to hypertension and (are) taking measures to correct these,” Harrison said.
The other centers are focusing on other major issues.
Northwestern University will take a closer look at why heart-health measures decline from childhood to middle age and see if the latest techniques can help maintain ideal heart health and reverse declines. The goal is to learn how to implement behavior change programs on a large scale.
Nearly one-third of adults and children in the United States are obese, with rates even higher in Hispanic and African-American communities. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai will aim to build a culture of health in Harlem with an urban-based, family-centric health program targeting kids as young as three years of age, as well as their caregivers.
Heart failure is one of the most common reasons people ages 65 and older go to the hospital. There are no proven therapies to prevent heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (hFpEF), which occurs in about half of heart failure patients. Additionally, patient prognosis has remained relatively unchanged over the past two decades. The University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center wants to shift the focus to prevention.
Funding began July 1, and each network center will receive about $3.8 million during the next four years.
RELATED LINKS:
