2021 M. Irené Ferrer Scholar Awardee, Columbia University
Marwah Abdalla, MD, MPH is a clinical cardiologist, cardiac intensivist, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. She is the Director of Education for the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and is a full-time faculty member in the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia. Her areas of expertise include critical care cardiology and hypertension. Dr. Abdalla is board certified in internal medicine, cardiology, and echocardiography. She is also an NIH funded clinical investigator with a research interest in the cardiovascular manifestations of hypertension, assessed by echocardiography, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, and sleep.
Dr. Abdalla received her Medical Degree and Masters in Public Health from Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health. She was an Intern, Resident, and Chief Resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She completed her training as a cardiology Fellow and Chief Fellow at Columbia University Medical Center.
Awarded: $60,000
What is Dr. Marwah Abdalla studying?
Doctor Abdalla is studying the impact of multiple stresses on blood pressure.
Why study Hypertension?
Hypertension is a leading global health problem: it affects over 1 billion people worldwide. Only about half of people with the disease are diagnosed and only about 20% achieve adequate control of their blood pressure. Hypertension is a key factor in causing coronary artery disease, stroke, heart failure, and kidney disease.
What did Dr. Abdalla find?
Dr. Abdalla has helped develop strategies to improve blood pressure control in the United States. Appropriately, she finds that the control of high blood pressure is woefully inadequate in our country and cites the probable causes for this (racism, lack of self-monitoring of BP in affected individuals, poor lifestyle lack of standard treatment protocols, and inadequate public education about the incidence and consequences of high blood pressure.
She described the impact of sleep on blood pressure, with one study on the association between sleep and psychological stress among NYC healthcare workers during the COVID-19 epidemic. She has also looked at the way in which racial and ethnic differences influence both the presentation and outcome of the disease in over 7000 patients treated at 88 hospitals across the United States: 53% of all deaths occurred in Black and Hispanic patients.
How did The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine’s grant help Dr. Marwah Abdalla’s research?
In the 4 years since receiving the Ferrer award, Doctor Abdalla has established herself as a major authority in the area of the factors involved in the development and treatment of hypertension. She has been a senior author or contributor to American Heart Association position papers on the topic and worked with colleagues on the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute on studying the importance of sleep patterns in the treatment of hypertension.
What is Dr. Marwah Abdalla’s current status?
Dr. Abdalla continues her work as a cardiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, where she is the Director of Education for the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. She continues her work at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia.