Diverse Offerings Inspiring Meaningful Change: A Preview of AHA 2024

The American Heart Association (AHA) was founded in 1924. As such, this year’s AHA conference held in Chicago, Illinois, will mark 100 years of the organization’s existence. The AHA Scientific Sessions will be held November 16-18 and feature research from a variety of different topics in cardiovascular medicine, including quality of care, the role of the brain, technological advancements and multimodality imaging, outcomes from new and novel interventions, and much more.

For many, the 100-year celebration could be their first witnessing all AHA has to offer. This is the case for Rebekah Walker, PhD, the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, who discussed the sessions and new experiences she looks forward to the most, her participation, and how exposure to AHA’s diverse offerings could impact her and her team’s own work.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

What sessions are you most excited about at AHA 2024, and what topics do you believe attendees should be aware of?

This is actually my first time going to AHA, so I'm pretty excited to be there. Based on the type of research that I do, I am most excited to go to the sessions that are focusing on population health, as well as a number of talks that are looking at integrating social and medical care. So, I'm excited to go to those talks to see how people are rolling out different interventions that bring social care into the medical space. I do a lot of work in food insecurity and food access, so that's a space that I'm interested in.

Another space that I'm interested in, and we'll be really excited to go to talks on, is how AI [artificial intelligence] is being used in the health care system. It's an incredible opportunity there, and seeing what people are doing with the different methodologies and how they're actually using it to change health care delivery will be really exciting.

Can you tell us about your participation at AHA and how your research fits into the broader goals of the conference?

I have done most of my work in the space of diabetes, and we have been looking at the role that structural racism plays on diabetes outcomes, and recently expanded that work and started looking at more cardiovascular outcomes.

I'm actually 1 of 3 members of my research team who are attending AHA and all of us are looking at this idea of different pathways that help us understand how structural racism is impacting cardiovascular health. My area of interest is food access. So, we looked at that as a particular pathway, but we also have some other posters and moderated poster sessions on other pathways that might help us to develop interventions that could try to improve outcomes for individuals who live in neighborhoods that have been historically redlined, or are experiencing structural racism in other ways.

How do you see the various research presented at AHA impacting your work or patient care?

I think what is really exciting about AHA and why we wanted to attend the meeting is because they really cover topics all the way from basic science up to implementation into the health care space. It’s always interesting to go to meetings where you are able to talk to people who are working on the same type of topic, but they're approaching it from a different perspective. They might have a different type of research framing that they're using, or they might come at it with a different way of understanding how relationships exist, what is happening at a biological level, what's happening at a social level, what's happening in the health care system. And so, for me, that's what's really exciting about coming to this meeting.

How I will apply it is: it's always interesting to hear how other people are thinking about the same topic that you've been thinking about and working on. It gives you new ways to think about the topic, but it also gives you new ways to identify how we can create change.