World Heart Day: PeerJ Research and Academic Editors Highlights

Cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death worldwide and this is projected to remain so, according to World Health Organization (WHO). About 17.3 million people died from cardiovascular disease in 2008, representing 30 percent of all global deaths. The number of people who die from cardiovascular diseases, mainly from heart disease and stroke, will increase to reach 23.3 million by 2030.

Together with organizations such as WHO, the World Heart Federation spreads the news that at least 80 percent of premature deaths from heart disease and stroke could be avoided if the main risk factors – which are tobacco, unhealthy diet and physical inactivity – are controlled.

In honor of World Heart Day, observed on September 29th each year, we wanted to highlight some of the PeerJ Academic Editors who work in this field, as well as to invite comments from the authors of relevant studies that we have recently published.

At PeerJ, we are fortunate to have an editorial board of over 800 Academic Editors – all of whom are established researchers in science and medicine. We asked some of these Editors, working in this field, if they could tell us a little bit about their work.

Dr. Mandeep Mehra is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Medical Director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. He told us about his fascinating work: “My research focuses on advanced heart failure diagnosis and treatment with a special emphasis on artificial heart pumps and transplantation. Our investigational team has pioneered understanding of accelerated coronary artery disease in heart transplant recipients, investigated novel anti-rejection medications and developed new tools for detecting rejection in transplanted hearts using genetic bio-signatures. Of particular note, we have discovered the deleterious effects of tobacco on donors and recipients after heart transplantation. More recently, we are focusing on developing novel minimally invasive techniques for right heart failure rescue and studying new artificial heart pumps to support and recover the failing heart.”

Dr. Jalees Rehman is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, University of Illinois, Chicago. He gave us some details about his work: “My research team studies various aspects of cardiovascular repair and regeneration. We are interested in understanding how adult stem cells, derived from the bone marrow or the fat tissue, increase the growth of existing blood vessels or help assemble vascular networks in engineered tissue. Another research focus of our laboratory is investigating the role of metabolic processes as regulators of stem cell differentiation and conversion of skin cells into cardiovascular cells.”

Dr. Bongani Mayosi is a Professor of Medicine and Head of the Department of Medicine of Groote Schuur Hospital and University of Cape Town. He is also the former President of the South African Heart Association, and his work targets heart diseases of the poor in Africa. He told us: “The heart diseases of the bottom billion poorest people in the world, such as rheumatic heart disease, are neglected. I am pleased that PeerJ will do its bit to highlight the need for greater efforts to prevent and treat rheumatic heart disease and other heart diseases of the poor during heart month.”

And of course, we have already published a number of interesting articles in this field. Here we asked some of the authors of those studies to discuss their work:

Dr Paul Brookes, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, writes about his PeerJ article “A non-cardiomyocyte autonomous mechanism of cardioprotection involving the SLO1 BK channel”:

“Large conductance potassium channels encoded by the Slo1 gene are thought to be involved in protecting the heart from ischemic injury, and until now it was just assumed the channels were in cardiomyocytes. Channel agonists were known to be cardioprotective, but nobody had ever studied these drugs in Slo1 knockout mice. We did this, and surprisingly we found that the drugs work by acting on Slo1 in intrinsic cardiac neurons. The notion that opening a Slo1 channel in a non-myocyte cell sends a ‘don’t die’ signal to cardiomyocytes, opens up some interesting avenues for future development of cardioprotective drugs.”

Dr. Jennifer Wagner, Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Playing with heart and soul…and genomes: sports implications and applications of personal genomics” told us about her published work:

“Genetic and genomic technologies are changing our understanding of health risks for a number of cardiac conditions, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). HCM is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death among US athletes, and an individual’s suspected or confirmed diagnosis of HCM– even if the individual has not yet expressed any symptoms –can have serious sports implications, as preventing sudden cardiac arrest among athletes is a high priority. In this article, I examined the ways in which a number of policies work together in a conservative manner, and I highlighted vulnerabilities of student athletes. While I acknowledge the importance of promoting player safety, I caution against genetic segregation of sports via pre-participation disqualifications.”

Lastly, in the published paper “What is the “normal” fetal heart rate?”, Dr. Martin Daumer’s group has conducted a retrospective computerized study to determinate the range of normal fetal heart from 20 to 42 weeks of gestation. The study involved over 78,000 electronically recorded fetal heart rate tracings. The authors concluded that the range of normal fetal heart during this period of gestation is 120 to 160 beats per minute. Their results led to an update of the guidelines of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie und Geburtshilfe German society.

It is inspiring how these experts, and published articles, tackle the heart in such different ways. This breadth of coverage, as well as the broad scientific and medical research community in this field, highlights the amazing diversity of heart research, which is very important for a multidisciplinary journal like PeerJ.

We would like to thank all the authors and PeerJ Academic Editors who agreed to participate in this post.