Help the AHA to be the solution for women and heart disease research.

The American Heart Association has been instrumental in increasing awareness that cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the No. 1 killer of Americans.  Despite important advances, CVD accounts for 37 percent of all deaths in women, nearly as many as the next five leading causes of death combined.  In the most recent year for which data are available, cardiovascular disease was the cause of death in 454,613 females, while all forms of cancer combined to kill 268,800.  Cardiovascular deaths in women represent over half (52.6 percent) of all of deaths from CVD.  Since 1984, the number of CVD deaths for females has exceeded those for males every year.

A leading priority of the American Heart Association is to fund research that increases an understanding of the causes, treatments and prevention of cardiovascular diseases and stroke.  This is most important in areas where there are critical gaps in knowledge… cardiovascular disease in women clearly includes many such gaps.  There is an urgent need to accelerate scientific efforts that provide for the development of new knowledge in preventing death and disability from CVD in women.

To this end, the AHA is seeking to secure financial support to be able to submit a Request for Applications (RFA) once there are sufficient funds to support this important research effort to advance CVD science in women.  To maximize knowledge discovery, it is imperative to have a mechanism that fosters institutional interaction among research facilities and collaboration across multiple areas of discipline-focused inquiry.  Therefore, the model for this funding initiative’s structure will be the ASA-Bugher Foundation Centers for Stroke Prevention Research.  This network of three institutional centers provides fellowship training and conducts research projects enhanced by cross-center collaboration.

When it is issued, the RFA’s focus will be the specified areas below: 

Heart attacks (myocardial infarction) in younger women.  Unfortunately, younger and middle-aged women who have a heart attack have poorer recovery than men, including higher mortality.  While recent research has clarified a number of aspects of the differences in the distribution and functional consequences of atherosclerosis in women, there remains an urgent need to understand the mechanisms which contribute to the higher death rate after heart attack among younger women.  

Arrhythmias.  It is critical that we pursue research to reduce the number of women experiencing and dying from sudden cardiac arrest.  It is known that women are at higher risk of certain types of arrhythmias (e.g., drug-induced torsades), warranting further investigation into electrophysiologic mechanisms.

Heart failure in older women.  There is a growing population of older women living with heart failure, creating an important public health issue with both human disease burden and societal economic implications.  Importantly, there are both the usual etiologies of heart failure in women (ischemic heart disease, viral cardiomyopathy), but also other pathologies specifically important for or over-represented in women (e. g., peri-partum cardiomyopathy, valvular heart diseases, and diastolic dysfunction). Research is needed to better define the pathophysiologies and to define optimal treatment approaches.