When the November 2020 news broke that two vaccines had proven to be highly effective in preventing COVID-19 or minimizing its impact, people everywhere began talking about seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. But many public health experts were talking, too, about another bright spot – the vast numbers of participants from racial and ethnic...
When the results from a landmark heart health study of American Indians were published in 1999, they shattered the health care community’s erroneous assumption that this population rarely got heart disease—that somehow they were naturally protected from it. Indeed, the study highlighted the exceedingly high rate of heart disease and its risk...
NIH study follows rare immune response to COVID-19 On a late October morning in southern Wyoming, 12-year-old Madilyn Dayton woke up feeling sick. The normally energetic child assumed she was coming down with a common cold, but in short order her symptoms got worse. “I had a really bad headache and just body aches all over,” said Madilyn, who goes...
Credit: Matt McGrievy, University of South Carolina
When most people think of soul food, they think of tasty faves like collard greens, fried chicken, mac-n-cheese, and black-eyed peas. These foods are beloved by many, and they often play a big part of many African American families’ traditions. It’s an historic cuisine that thrived during slavery and traces its roots to Africa. But traditional soul...
For more than a decade, NHLBI’s Learn More Breathe Better SM program has worked with leading lung health organizations around the country to educate, engage, and empower the more than 16 million Americans living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as well as their families, caregivers, and health care providers. As the nation marks...
Peter Libby, M.D., never imagined nearly 40 years ago that his research would contribute to the current understanding of how the novel coronavirus targets and ravages the blood vessels in people with COVID-19. In the 1980s, Libby, then an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, was the first to discover that arterial...
Could bring improved diagnostics and treatments for dementia, stroke, brain trauma, and more The blood-brain barrier has been called one of neurology’s greatest challenges. The thin, selectively permeable membrane acts almost like plastic wrap, protecting the brain tissue from dangerous pathogens and toxins in the blood. In short, it maintains the...
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...
Months ago, when news came flooding in about the dire toll the novel coronavirus can take on the body, so did the phone calls to Beth Kozel, M.D., Ph.D. A clinical geneticist in the Division of Intramural Research (DIR) at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), Kozel cares for adult and pediatric patients with rare connective tissue...
Researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health have launched a key study to explore the safety and effectiveness of convalescent plasma in treating patients who have recently (within the last week) developed mild to moderate symptoms of COVID-19 disease. The study, which focuses on patients not yet hospitalized, comes on the heels of an...
The coronavirus pandemic has caused tragedy and turmoil for millions of people around the world, but it has been particularly unkind to one group whose health journey is often overlooked: Those with sickle cell disease. A growing number of studies now suggest that people with this painful genetic blood disorder who also are infected with SARS-CoV-2...