Falling asleep while driving is a significant public health problem, leading to tens of thousands of automobile accidents every year in the United States. It has been known that in the US, blacks and Hispanics are at higher risk of drowsy driving than...

Smoking has long been a major risk factor for coronary artery disease (CAD). The last 4 decades have seen significant changes to population health and CAD risk factors, including a decline in smoking prevalence, an increase in diabetes and obesity, and the...

Epidemiological studies have shown that chronic exposure to environmental air pollution is associated with adverse health outcomes, but their role in racial disparities in clinical outocmes has not been fully elucidated. We aimed to assess racial...

Heart failure is one of the largest public health problems. One type of heart failure, known as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), is the most common type yet there are no specific therapies, with now multiple negative clinical trials...

Dr. Polakit Teekakirikul, a cardiology fellow in the Heart & Vascular Institute, is lead author on an expert opinion article featured on the American College of Cardiology education website. "Mitral valve derangement is increasingly recognized as a...

In a study published this month in the journal Heart, a team of Pitt researchers performed serial echocardiograms in a cohort of 407 patients that underwent transcatheter aortic valve replacement at UPMC between July 2011 and January 2016. Prior work has...

A team of Pitt and UPMC investigators used diagnosis codes from administrative data to identify a large cohort of patients with heart failure. In this study, all hospital encounters with heart failure between 2008 and 2015 were assigned an ICD-9 heart...