yang Your heart behaves differently throughout the day regardless of what you’re doing. Heart rate, blood pressure, and autonomic nervous system (ANS) balance follow a predictable 24-hour pattern called the circadian rhythm. That means your cardiovascular health is tied to your body’s internal biological clock because it influences heart rate variability (HRV). Understanding how circadian rhythms and … Read more
The human heart beats around 100,000 times a day and without much conscious instruction. Your blood pressure can adjust in real time based on various factors, including your position, your activities, and your stress level. But behind that subconscious regulation is the autonomic nervous system (ANS) running in the background. Let’s discuss how it regulates … Read more
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for roughly one in three fatalities nationwide. However, a significant portion of those people aren’t identified as high risk until after a cardiovascular event occurs. And part of the problem is that traditional risk prediction calculators depend on cumulative factors such as … Read more
The human heart has been treated as a relatively simple organ for most of modern history. Cardiomyocytes were the star of the show, and everything else was the supporting cast. Resulting was a field defined by therapies largely designed around a single cell type, making diseases like heart failure, fibrosis, and arrhythmia difficult to treat … Read more
The human heart takes its cues from chemistry as much as anatomy. A stream of Hormonal signals tells blood vessels when to expand or contract and tells the liver how to handle cholesterol. Those factors can impact how hard the heart has to work. Over time, sustained shifts in hormone signaling can turn into heart … Read more
Social determinants of health, such as income, healthcare availability, education, food access, and location, are non-medical factors that can shape a person’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease and ability to survive it.The Healthy People 2030 framework organizes these non-medical influences into five distinct categories:All five categories operate through mechanisms, including chronic stress, poor nutrition, reduced … Read more
Heart failure is often framed as a problem of pump function. It occurs when the heart can’t contract forcefully enough or relax properly to fill with blood.Underlying both of those dysfunctions is a cellular process that researchers are still working to interrupt . Cardiac fibroblasts are central to that process. When they activate, they reshape the … Read more
Most conversations about heart failure focus on the left ventricle because it’s the chamber responsible for pumping oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. But the right side of the heart carries an equally critical role, and right-sided heart failure can lead to widespread systemic complications that are difficult to ignore.How Right-Sided Heart Failure … Read more
Most heart failure treatment begins after the damage is done. A patient develops symptoms, imaging confirms structural changes, and a medication regimen is built around managing what remains. But gene therapy research is beginning to ask a different question entirely: what if intervention could occur before any of this begins?For the hundreds of thousands of … Read more
Gene therapy works alongside traditional heart failure treatment. Standard medications help manage blood pressure, fluid retention, and cardiac workload. Gene therapy addresses the damaged and dysfunctional cells inside the cardiac muscle itself. For patients with heart failure driven by a genetic mutation or progressive cellular breakdown, combining both approaches could provide a more comprehensive treatment strategy … Read more
