Written by Christina Crowe

A 2021 article written by a collaborative team of UAB researchers has been awarded the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology's 2022 Impact Award. "Racial and socioeconomic disparity associates with differences in cardiac DNA methylation among men with end-stage heart failure," authored by Mark Pepin, M.D., Ph.D., Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Experimental Cardiology at Heidelberg University; Bertha Hidalgo, Ph.D., M.P.H., Associate Professor, School of Public Health; Adam Wende, Ph.D., Associate Professor, UAB Pathology, and Selwyn Vickers, M.D., Office of the Dean and Senior Vice President for Medicine, UAB Heersink School of Medicine, received the honor.

The AJP-Heart and Circ Impact Award is based on the Altmetric Score for the article (241) and the total online article usage (2,800+ abstract/full text/PDF downloads). The article was picked up by eight news outlets, including UAB News, and tweeted over 250 times. In addition, the episode “Racial & Socioeconomic Determinants of the Cardiac Epigenome” of the The AJP-Heart and Circ Podcast about the work has been downloaded over 350 times. 

This is the fourth year for this award, which was announced at the American Physiological Society Cardiovascular Section Banquet at Experimental Biology 2022 in Philadelphia, PA.

Dean Vickers interviewed Wende about the study on his podcast, "The Checkup."

Other UAB collaborators on the article include, Chae-Myeong Ha, Luke A. Potter and Sayan Bakshi, Division of Molecular and Cellular Pathology, UAB Department of Pathology; Joseph P. Barchue, Ayman Haj Asaad, Steven M. Pogwizd and Salpy V. Pamboukian, Division of Cardiovascular Disease, UAB Department of Medicine,

The study, of end-stage heart-failure patients, found that cytosine-p-guanine, or CpG, methylation of the DNA in the heart has a bimodal distribution among the patients, and that race — African American versus Caucasian — was the sole variable in patient records that explained the difference. A subsequent look at the census tracts where the patients lived showed that the African American subjects lived in neighborhoods with more racial diversity and poverty, suggesting that the underlying variable may be a socioeconomic difference.