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doctor help check patient heart

Using Polygenic Risk Scores to Predict Cardiovascular Disease

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

SingleCellSequencingCVRTI1

What Single-Cell Sequencing Is Revealing About the Heart

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

Nurse holding heart

Can Hormones Influence Cardiovascular Wellness?

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

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How Social Factors Shape Cardiovascular Health Across Communities

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

How Cardiac Fibroblasts Drive Heart Failure Progression

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

heart

Right-Sided Heart Failure: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment

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

heart and DNA

Can Gene Therapy One Day Prevent Heart Failure Before It Starts?

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 cell

How Gene Therapy for Cardiovascular Disease Works Alongside Traditional Heart Failure Treatments

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

Multiple pipettes dispensing liquid droplets into a blue-lit 96-well microplate, illustrating a laboratory automation or scientific experiment process.

What We Know About the Safety of Cardiac Gene Therapy

Heart disease kills more people globally each year than any other condition. For decades, treatment has largely been limited to managing symptoms with medications aimed at reducing strain on the failing heart. None of these approaches address the underlying biological factors driving cardiac disease; however,gene therapy offers a different approach. Cardiac gene therapy enables the delivery … Read more