What are the best tools/algorithms for robust and objective evaluations of sleep health biomarkers?

Often under recognized, the cardiac endothelial cells are highly abundant in the heart, and may have important roles in modulating cardiac function, besides simply serving as structural component of blood vessels. Evidences of ours and others have indicated an emerging role of cardiac endothelial cells signaling to cardiomyocytes to mediate important pathophysiological responses. Nonetheless, detailed mechanisms of... more »

We need to spread R01 funding around more to ensure that the best science has funding adequate to move forward. To do this I believe changing how we think about R01 funding and expenditures can be used to put the NIH funds to better use. Too often successful researchers have the majority of their salaries on R01s and the institutions have little skin in the game. PI salaries can be a large part of the escalating budget... more »

The strategic vision to enhance translation and to enhance the workforce both require training that spans the scope of basic science, pre-clinical development, clinical trials. We lack coherent mechanisms for training the next generation of translational researchers, some of whom may be MDs, and some PhDs. A program should provide cross-training of Clinical Fellows and Postdocs to reflect the needed interactions between... more »

There is a need for more enhanced pain research in order to help improve sickle cell disease patient outcomes and quality of life.

Obesity research is riddled with methodological problems that are rarely challenged, leading to the perpetuation of misinformation and interventions that do harm. Given the two-thirds of the population who are classified as higher weight and thus subject to these interventions, it is past time to clean up the basic scientific flaws in this research area.

For a quick summary of a couple of these issues, see Poodle Science:... more »

Although the NCRR and NIGMS used to have a mechanism to train new generation of clinical & translational scientists, this program was stopped. Why?

What is the possibility of other institutes to come up with the priority of funding resources in this regard?

A number of cities(e.g Berkeley), states and countries (e.g Mexico's SSB tax, Chiles SSB and soon marketing controls and food package front of package label) will go into effect. Rigorous evaluations of the efforts will provide some sense of their potential to effect food purchase and dietary pattern and ultimately cardiometaboiic changes. Serious rigorous independent evaluations are needed to learn if these options--pushed... more »

Can cardiorespiratory fitness prior to hematopoietic cell transplantation be improved and will this limit morbidity and mortality following transplantation?

Financial and intellectual conflict(s) of interest are common in academic medical sciences. Those conflicts could potentially bias decisions of study section members and change grant application outcomes. During the grant review process, financial and/or intellectual conflict(s) of interest disclosures of the study section members are not readily available to the grant applicants or the public. Should the NHBI increase... more »

How can we ensure that patients with serious heart, lung, or blood diseases fully understand their prognosis, treatment options, and the risks and benefits of those options and help them make decisions that fully incorporate their own personal values, goals, and treatment preferneces?

What types of newer patient-centered quality of life assessment tools can be employed in heart, lung, blood and sleep studies so that they can be validated and refined to improve our measurement of quality of life outcomes in populations of interest to NHLBI?

Does palliative care and/or hospice care as practiced across communities improve end-of-life care for COPD – specifically, does it reduce the burden of symptoms, improve HRQoL and satisfaction, reduce utilization in last 6 months of life (i.e. hospital visits, cost, invasive ventilation use, etc), improve the end-of-life experience, and increase the concordance of place of death to expressed patient preferences?

What are the specific contributors of obesity that lead to chronic positive energy balance and surplus energy storage?

From Cochrane Review NOV 20 2014
RB Haynes

“It is uncertain how medicine adherence can consistently be improved so that the full health benefits of medicines can be realized. We need more advanced methods for researching ways to improve medicine adherence, including better interventions, better ways of measuring adherence, and studies that include sufficient patients to draw conclusions on clinically important effects.”... more »