American Heart Association
The American Heart Association (AHA) is a non-profit organization in the United States that funds cardiovascular medical research, educates consumers on healthy living and fosters appropriate cardiac care in an effort to reduce disability and deaths caused by cardiovascular disease and stroke. Originally formed in New York City in 1924 as the Association for the Prevention and Relief of Heart Disease, it is currently headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The American Heart Association is a national voluntary health agency.
Paul Dudley White
He was a moving force in the creation of the International Association of Cardiology, and later the International Cardiology Foundation. In 1949, he was named executive director of the National Advisory Heart Council. He was the chief consultant to the National Heart Institute from 1948 to 1955 and was a major impetus in the Framingham Heart Study, which was the first major epidemiologic work to identify risk factors in coronary artery disease. He was also influential in the American Red Cross and in establishing the National Institutes of Health.
White received many international honors and was instrumental in establishing cardiology organizations throughout the world, even in the People's Republic of China which he was one of the first American physicians to visit. He also established a connection with Alexander Filipovich Samoilov, a Soviet physiologist who shared White's interest in the electrophysiology of the heart. White was one of the founders of the International Society of Cardiology in 1946, helped to organize its first World Congress of Cardiology four years later in Paris, and presided over the second World Congress in Washington in 1954.