A hypnotic rhythm underlies your existence. It began before you were born. It continues, right this very moment, without a single conscious thought on your part. It will be with you until the end. Lay a hand to your chest. Feel it. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ba-bum.
The heart is the muscle that works harder than any other. It contracts as if being squeezed then relaxes, over and over and over again, around 100,000 times a day. That's roughly three billion times in an average lifespan. With each beat, the heart valves take turns opening and snapping shut in a well-orchestrated dance to keep oxygen-rich blood flowing through the branching network of arteries and veins stretching from the top of your head down to your toes.
The heart's job is relatively straightforward, even simple. The heart itself is remarkably complex. Its many marvels and enduring mysteries have been an endless source of fascination for millennia. Aristotle considered it the most important organ. French philosopher René Descartes saw it as a sort of engine. Leonardo da Vinci filled countless pages of his famous notebooks with intricately detailed ink-and-quill anatomical studies, in many cases hypothesizing correctly about its function. Beneath one such drawing, he wrote:
"How in words can you describe this heart without filling a whole book?"
Indeed, how? Even today, researchers like Joshua Hutcheson — a biomedical engineer and Fellow of the American Heart Association who has studied the heart's intricate mechanisms for the better part of a decade — can attest to the fact that understanding the heart remains an awe-inspiring journey into the unknown. In lectures, he shows students Leonardo's drawings. On the wall of his Cardiovascular Matrix Remodeling Lab at FIU hangs a quote from Descartes. Both are nods to the origins of modern physiology as much as reminders to embrace the kind of curiosity that drove the great thinkers of history.
Asking big, bold and daring universal questions — the why and how of life — is almost a prerequisite when it comes to the heart. "That's how you get to a place where you discover something completely new," says Hutcheson.
Here's one: Why does the heart work flawlessly throughout an entire lifetime for some and not for others?
Cardiovascular disease — an umbrella term encompassing a number of conditions, including coronary heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmias (i.e. atrial fibrillation), vascular disease, congenital heart defects and more — has been the nation's leading cause of death for over a century.
The good news: Death rates have steadily declined over the decades, thanks in part to widely available medications that control blood pressure and artery-clogging cholesterol, as well as successful public health campaigns to stop smoking. The not-so-good news: The downward trend is stalling. An aging population — expected to drive a surge in cardiovascular disease burden — is on a collision course with a growing number of younger adults with risk factors, such as uncontrolled blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.
The American Heart Association estimates at least six in 10 U.S. adults (more than 184 million people) will have some type of cardiovascular disease by 2050.
At FIU and beyond, researchers like Hutcheson as well as physician-scientists and cardiac surgeons focus their life's work around addressing this problem. In their labs and the clinic, they are leading major technological and life-saving therapeutic advances to gain a deeper understanding of how cardiovascular disease happens and transform how it is prevented, detected and treated.
Silent beginnings
There's a lot about cardiovascular disease that's vexing. Perhaps most frustrating is how it moves in stealth. "By the time symptoms appear, the heart has been irreparably damaged," explains Hutcheson.
Atherosclerosis, the buildup of plaque in the arteries, is a major culprit of disease and slow-ticking time bomb. In fact, it can start in childhood.
