News

New research shows that by tending to their cardiovascular health now, patients can get big benefits during pregnancy and beyond It’s important to keep hearts healthy at every life stage, but how people take care of themselves leading up to and during pregnancy can affect their cardiovascular health for decades. Victoria Pemberton , a nurse and...

A cell-based look at how the body responds to immune threats may one day help researchers find better treatments for this major U.S. killer For more than a decade, researchers have known that a core component of human immune function – called complement – can influence how the body responds to immune threats. Now researchers from the NIH and around...

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...

Not so long ago, when doctors saw a patient with the inflammatory skin condition psoriasis, their first line of attack was to address the signs they could see—red, itchy, scaly patches, mostly on the knees, elbows, trunk and scalp. But research over the last several years is forcing a rethinking of the very nature of this common disease. Rather...

When doctors diagnosed Mary Douglas-Brown, 69, with breast cancer in 2004, she turned to her congregation at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in Washington D.C. for support, only to learn that it did not have a ministry to provide health and lifestyle resources that might help her through her ordeal. So she did what any determined churchgoer would do...

For nearly 50 years Ken Wilkinson has dutifully committed time as a research volunteer to participate in all kinds of heart-related tests—blood pressure measurements, cholesterol screenings, heart rate checks, MRIs, EKGs. Like his wife’s mom once did and his own six children do now, the 77-year-old retired plumber volunteers for the Framingham...

Randomized Trial to Prevent Vascular Events in HIV (REPRIEVE) needs volunteers. Learn more at http://www.reprievetrial.org.

Not so long ago, living longer was its own reward for people with HIV. Antiretroviral therapy extended lives, gave hope, and silenced what for many had felt like a ticking clock. But for the 1.2 million HIV-positive people in the United States, an extended life has come with its own heart...