There is a need to recognize and study the interdependencies between the brain/peripheral nervous system and the heart/vascular systems in health and disease to develop interventions to detect, treat, and prevent cardiovascular disease.

There is a need for understanding of right heart failure (RHF) and its consequences following left ventricular assist device (LVAD) support, as well as to develop devices to optimally support the right ventricle.

There is a need to address chronic heart failure (HF) through improved identification of patients at risk for HF and of patients with pathological ventricular remodeling who have minimal evidence of clinical HF, and more focused and individualized pharmacologic and lifestyle treatments and monitoring of patients with HF risk. Approaches would include big data collection, omics, statistical modeling, and focused clinical... more »

What is the nature of, and what are the best treatments for, heart failure in COPD?

Conduct proof-of-concept studies and explore whether strategies to reverse or prevent fibrosis are feasible.

We now can create critical cell types like cardiomyocytes etc. from stem cells. Additionally, we are learning the rules of using these cells to rebuild tissues. A major gap in our knowledge relates to the immunobiology of these cells. Lessons from transplantation medicine are only partially applicable, because solid organs are more complex and likely more immunogenic than defined cell populations.

How does the immune... more »

Twice I was allowed to develop severe heart failure symptoms that required hospitalization to treat because my primary care physician assumed that my ONLY problem was that I am fat.

Every doctor knows that obesity can lead to the development of diabetes, heart diseases, joint damage and yet too many doctors on the frontlines just say: You're fat go diet.

My first experience with this was when I was first diagnosed... more »

End stage congestive heart failure (CHF) causes intensive lung remodeling beyond the type-2 pulmonary hypertension. CHF induced lung remodeling includes profound lung fibrosis, lung vascular remodeling and lung inflammation. Understanding CHF-induced lung remodeling is also critical to understand the right ventricular failure. However, this area is largely unstudied. Regulating CHF-induced lung remodeling and the underlying... more »

There is a need to improve identification and surveillance of persons at risk for heart failure and pathological ventricular remodeling prior to development of clinically overt heart failure.

What is the best way to use what we have learned about the pediatric myocardium and cardiac-pulmonary interactions in congenital heart disease to develop new pathways for treating pediatric heart failure?

Once heart failure has developed, can diet and exercise measures work to reverse it?

 

Well-designed clinical trials are needed to answer this question.

Mortality is similar between HFpEF and HFrEF but we have currently no viable therapeutic option for HFpEF. There have been many large trials, but they all failed. Our basic understanding of the disease is very limited which contributed to failures of many prior trials and wasting $$$. We know very little about the pathophysiology of the disease . It is time to get back to the basic science and use our new tools (e.g.... more »

Major depression (MD) is common in patients with heart failure, and it is an independent risk marker for functional decline, hospitalization, and mortality. Two large trials have shown that it can be difficult to treat. SADHART-CHF, a double-blind, placebo-controlled RCT (n=469), found that sertraline was not efficacious for MD in HF. MOOD-HF (n=372) showed that escitalopram was not efficacious. Smaller trials of cognitive-behavioral... more »

Is cardiac contraction and relaxation in heart failure modulated by the systemic inflammatory response?

There is overwhelming evidence that inflammatory biomarkers predict worse outcome in acute and chronic heart failure.

Despite the wealth of evidence, clinical trials in this area have either not been completed, failed, or provided inconclusive results.

The questions that remain are:
1) Is inflammation a mechanism... more »

We need much more support for critical basic research to understand and develop transformative therapies for this enormous health care burden. This is not simply a question of epidemiology and large multicenter population data bases. We really need hard core science. It is impossible to know where the next breakthrough will come, and setting aside funds for hot button things - stem cells, or iPS, or gene editing per... more »