About Music for the Heart1

The economic cost of treating cardiovascular disease in the US is about $1 billion per day. Our best chance for reversing this trend is to discover cures and better prevention strategies. We believe that the one way to accomplish this is by focusing resources on basic research. Music for the Heart provides "seed grants" to support creative new research. Such research is needed to find cures, not just 'treatments'. Cures would eliminate the expense and risks of chronic medication use. They would eliminate coronary artery bypass and stent placements. Imagine the economic benefit of saving $400 billion each year!

Even though we can reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) by modifying diet and lifestyle, we still don't know how to prevent or cure CVD. Our genes play the greatest role in causing it. Discovering cures relies on basic research into the role of genetic inheritance and mechanisms of blood vessel damage.

In the longterm, basic research is our most cost-effective tool for discovering cures. Since inheritance plays the most critical role in CVD, we must rely on basic research to answer fundamental questions like: What is the genetic code that causes blood vessels to form? How do cells in the placenta send signals to the developing embryonic heart? How do we inherit a high risk for cardiovascular disease? While clinical research studies interventions and drug therapies, basic research help us understand how heart cells and blood vessels develop and function in health and disease.

A real-life example: There is new evidence of a correlation between risk of CVD and the nutritional status of the individual’s mother during their fetal development. Low birth-weight babies are at higher risk for developing coronary heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes as adults. If we can understand the causes of this recently discovered phenomenon at the cellular and genetic levels we stand a good chance of discovering interventions to prevent CVD in that individual’s adult life. To understand programming mechanisms, we must direct resources to centers where basic research occurs.