World Heart Day is celebrated each year on September 29th to raise awareness about the dangers of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and its impact on patients’ lives. Created by the World Heart Foundation, World Heart Day brings together people from around the world showcasing how to live heart-healthy lives and reduce the risk of CVD.
In recognition of this year’s World Heart Day, Medidata will help build awareness of the significance of cardiovascular disease and help promote a heart-healthy lifestyle through a series of events and activities.
The heart is the strongest muscle in your body and is about the size of your fist. The heart beats about 100,000 times a day and in the average lifetime, the human heart will have beaten more than 2.5 billion times.
However, although impressive and strong, your heart can also become vulnerable from habitual risk factors like smoking, eating an unhealthy diet, a sedentary lifestyle, and/or stress. The heart can also be weakened from a pre-existing cardiac condition and other physiological factors, including hypertension or high cholesterol. When your heart’s functions become compromised, this is known as cardiovascular disease, a broad term that covers any disorder to the system that centers on the heart. Common symptoms of CVD include chest tightness or pressure, difficulty catching your breath, dizziness, fatigue, fluid build-up, heart palpitations, and pain or numbness in your legs or arms.
Cardiovascular disease is the world’s No. 1 killer, causing more than 18.6 million deaths per year and affecting over 520 million people worldwide*. CVD belongs to a class of diseases that affect the heart or blood vessels (veins and arteries). Of these deaths, 85% are due to coronary artery diseases (e.g., heart attacks) and cerebrovascular diseases (e.g., strokes) and mostly affect low- and middle-income countries. These are startling figures that have a major impact on patients, families, and our healthcare system.
There are many common treatments for the different types of cardiovascular disease. Often, this starts with lifestyle changes. As the disease progresses, physicians usually look to medications, devices, and surgery to manage symptoms. But before any of the current treatment options reached the market, they needed to prove they were both safe and efficacious in clinical trials.
Medidata’s ongoing commitment to finding treatments for cardiovascular disease includes supporting 161 biopharma and medical device companies in conducting 770+ cardiovascular studies involving almost 650,000 patients. Medidata’s cloud-based platform enables clinical trials to run smoother, faster, and safer for patients in today’s complex world of precision medicine.
Medidata helped support the ADAPTABLE study, a large cardiovascular clinical trial study to evaluate the most effective dose of aspirin while minimizing side effects. Millions of Americans with heart disease rely on daily aspirin to prevent a heart attack or stroke. Working with researchers at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, Medidata’s decentralized/virtual trial solutions allowed the remote management of the patient informed consent process, enrollment, and randomization while allowing patients to easily report their health outcomes through a browser on their desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet. ADAPTABLE was the largest virtual pragmatic clinical trial conducted at the time.
Medidata looks forward to continuing to help researchers find new and better treatments for heart diseases so people can lead longer, healthier lives.
Learn more about how Medidata supports cardiovascular clinical trials.
*https://world-heart-federation.org/world-heart-day/about-whd/