Improving Cardiac Wellness...

An exciting new partnership between Women’s Health Research at Yale and the McConnell Heart Health Center has been established to study the impact of
research-driven prevention and treatment methods on cardiovascular health outcomes in a major clinical care setting serving thousands of patients per year.

• Cardiovascular disease remains the single greatest cause of mortality for both women and men in our nation.

• To improve prevention and treatment strategies, interdisciplinary research needs to identify the biological and behavioral factors that affect health outcomes in targeted populations.
• Equally important, scientific findings need to be integrated into clinical settings and then studied to determine their effectiveness.
• Our new collaborative effort is designed to generate new findings, implement new approaches to care, and assess the effectiveness of these strategies in an active cardiac wellness center.
• As increasing evidence suggests that gender-specific approaches in prevention and treatment of disease produce better outcomes, a major aspect of our effort will be the examination of gender differences in risk and protective factors and in response to treatment.

Our focused collaboration will be led by Dr. Carolyn M. Mazure, Director of Women’s Health Research at Yale, and Dr. Teresa Caulin-Glaser, the Executive Director of the McConnell Heart Health Center - one the largest freestanding cardiac wellness centers of its kind in the Midwest.

Founded in 1998 through a charitable contribution by John H. McConnell in Columbus, Ohio, the McConnell Heart Health Center offers both management and prevention of cardiovascular disease. With over 25,000 patient visits per year for cardiovascular care alone, this active clinical setting provides an outstanding opportunity to collect data on patients as they seek care and determine better methods for treating and preventing cardiac disease.

Sherry McKee, Ph.D. will provide expertise with regard to behavioral factors related to cardiac status and outcome, such as stress, depression and addictive behaviors including smoking. Richard Snow DO, MPH, a physician epidemiologist working with the McConnell Heart Health Center in study design, analysis and interpretation will provide support for the health services research within our initiative.

The long term goal of this initiative is to develop improved strategies for maintaining cardiovascular health, enhance treatment methods for disease, and disseminate new clinical information to care providers around the nation.