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When Katie Goff was a freshman in college, she began to suffer a myriad of seemingly unrelated symptoms – respiratory infections, heartburn, headaches, fatigue, insomnia, and relentless nausea. Visits to the doctor didn’t seem to help. At one visit, the doctor told her she had allergies. At another, she was given a prescription for an...

When Joia Crear-Perry, M.D., an obstetrician and gynecologist, found “ African American descent” listed by cardiovascular experts as a risk factor for postpartum heart disease , she realized even advocates like her were doing something wrong, and that the media was amplifying the error. With the U.S. maternal health crisis gripping public attention...

Sleep apnea, obesity, race among the risk factors for pregnancy-related complications During the last few decades, maternal deaths — long considered a critical marker of the health of a nation — have been declining in much of the world. But in the United States, the maternal death rate has increased an estimated 58% since 1990. The increase has...

For decades, the NHLBI has aggressively studied heart failure – a chronic, debilitating condition that develops when the heart can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. Heart failure affects more than 6.5 million adults in the United States alone and continues to be a growing public health threat, largely because of an aging population and...

In the early months of the pandemic, alarms sounded after doctors noticed that people with heart disease were faring a lot worse than others who had contracted COVID-19. Almost a year later, researchers are still pondering why these patients get sicker and die at higher rates. But they’re now puzzling over an arguably bigger mystery: why some who...

Taking small steps to move more, eat more fruits and veggies, and sleep well supports cardiovascular health You’ve heard it before: when you move more, eat well, and get good sleep, not only do you build a stronger body and healthier heart, you reduce the risk for cardiovascular disease, a leading cause of death in the United States. But how can...

Fast timing and treatment strengthen health outcomes for women with severe pregnancy complications During the 10 years she was a nurse working with pregnant women at an Alexandria, Virginia hospital, Sacha Han, B.S.N., R.N., and her colleagues were forever on alert. “I set timers on my phone,” Han recalled. If a woman’s systolic blood pressure...

New global data analysis highlights the urgency of translating research into practice Over the last 30 years, deaths and disability from cardiovascular disease have been steadily rising across the globe . In 2019 alone, the condition, which includes heart disease and stroke, was responsible for a staggering one-third of all deaths worldwide. Then...

When you think of the San Francisco Bay Area, those young, tech-savvy college graduates who work for some of the world’s largest software companies there may first come to mind. But this bustling metropolitan area is also home to nearly 1.5 million people age 65 and older . So when the city went into its first lockdown in March to try to halt the...

When the results from a landmark heart health study of American Indians were published in 1999, they shattered the health care community’s erroneous assumption that this population rarely got heart disease—that somehow they were naturally protected from it. Indeed, the study highlighted the exceedingly high rate of heart disease and its risk...