$8M Grant to Support Rheumatic Fever Research
Post Date: August 13, 2022 | Publish Date:
Pediatric cardiologist Andrea Beaton, MD, has been awarded an $8 million grant from the Leducq Foundation for her proposal to establish an “Acute Rheumatic Fever Diagnosis Collaborative Network.”
The foundation awarded the grant because they believe her work “has the potential to lead to a diagnostic test for acute rheumatic fever, thus making an important contribution to efforts to eliminate rheumatic heart disease.”
The grant comes less than a year after Beaton and colleagues published significant findings in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrating that antibiotic treatment can significantly reduce the risk of underlying rheumatic heart disease progression in children and adolescents.
Developing improved diagnostic tests for the condition is important because, in low-resource settings, 85% of children with rheumatic heart disease are diagnosed only after the disease has become well-advanced, making medications ineffective and surgical intervention—if available—less likely to succeed.
