First Lady Jill Biden toured the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center and Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Friday, Dec. 8, as part of the White House’s initiative on women’s health research.
She arrived at the Cedars-Sinai media center at 1:50 p.m. and was greeted by, and accompanied on the tour by, 36th District Congressman Ted Lieu and his spouse Betty Lieu; Thomas M. Priselac, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; Dr. Shlomo Melmed, executive vice president of academic affairs and dean of the medical faculty at Cedars-Sinai; Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center; and Maria Shriver, founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement — and the former first lady of California.
“Research on women’s health has been underfunded for decades and many conditions that mostly and only affect women, or affect women differently, have received limited attention — like those debilitating migraines and undiagnosed heart attacks,” Dr. Biden said.
“Because of these gaps we understand far too little about these conditions, and how to help the millions of women who struggle with them,” ” Biden said, “And these gaps are even greater for communities that historically have been excluded from research, including women of color and women with disabilities.”
At the medical center’s Simulation Center, Biden and other participants talked to Cedars-Sinai researchers about their use of advanced imaging to study the differences between hearts and brains in men and women. Funding for the study, researchers said, comes from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
In the Van Eyk Laboratory at the medical center, Dr. Biden and other guests learned from researchers how the study of female genes, proteins, and vascular cells leads the way to understanding women’s heart diseases and the development of specific diagnostics and therapeutics.
The First Lady asked one…
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