Daniel Levy

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If you decrease the BP too low, then the flow of blood in the coronary arteries and the oxygen supply to the myocardium will decline. In patients with CAD and the elderly, diastole is the time when the myocardium fills with blood. Caution should be observed in lowering the diastolic BP in patients with CAD or in elderly patients who presumably have more atheroma than younger patients, and the physician should be alert to signs of ischemia as the BP goes down. The diastolic BP should not really be lowered below about 60 mm Hg.

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This allowed us to discover 52 regions where 67 genes are located, which we now think are involved in the functioning of the cardiac muscle. We already knew that some of these genes cause serious cardiac diseases, but we did not realise that the majority of them also play a role in the way the heart functions.

Daniel Levy

Senior investigator, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute · National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

3mo

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Prior to Framingham we understood relatively little about causal factors related to heart disease and we knew even less about things you could do to prevent it.

Donald Lloyd-Jones

Professor of preventive medicine, Northwestern University · Northwestern University

3mo

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A risk calculator will never be perfect, but this is a huge step ahead from where we were 12 years ago. We made it better for women, for African Americans, and for white men, too. We feel very confident that we are in a great place now, but as more data become available, we're very happy to see if we can improve it further. You can certainly criticize the calculator, but I don't know of anything that's better.

Thomas J. Wang

Chief, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Vanderbilt

3mo

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The founders of Framingham and similar studies were obviously making an investment for the future. They had a fundamental understanding that collecting clinical observations in people over time would be extremely valuable for biomedical research.

Emily Lau

Cardiologist, Massachusetts General Hospital · Massachusetts General Hospital

3mo

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heart failure is fundamentally different in men and women

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This is one of the strongest predictors of new-onset heart failure we've been able to find, and it holds up even when you control for other biomarkers and risk factors including high blood pressure and diabetes.