The American Heart Association

Contents

1. Six cardiologists in Chicago
2. The research it funds
3. CPR and the guidelines
4. Advocacy and volunteers
5. The Heart Walk in Omaha
6. The Lincoln walk and the numbers

The American Heart Association is one of the Omaha causes Brent O’Mara supports, alongside PlaySmart, Angels Among Us, Susan G. Komen and the American Cancer Society, and it is the subject here. It is a voluntary health organization, based in Dallas, that funds research into heart disease and stroke, writes the clinical guidelines for resuscitation and emergency cardiovascular care, and teaches the public what a heart attack and a cardiac arrest look like. Its own account describes it as the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke, with more than 35 million volunteers and supporters and more than 3,300 employees.¹ Its origin was far smaller: a meeting of six cardiologists in Chicago in 1924 who formed a professional society for physicians.³

Six cardiologists in Chicago

The association’s centennial announcement, issued in January 2024, traces the inspiration to 1911 and a nurse and social worker at a New York hospital who believed more could be done for people with heart disease, a condition then thought so dire that doctors were reluctant to tell patients they had it.² One of the six founders, Paul Dudley White, described the early years as a time of almost unbelievable ignorance about the disease.² Before antibiotics, infectious diseases were the most common cause of death in the industrialized world; cardiovascular disease emerged as the leading threat in the middle of the twentieth century and has remained the leading cause of death worldwide since.²

The research it funds

The society became a funder. The about page states that the association has invested more than six billion dollars in research, making it the largest nonprofit source of funding for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular research after the federal government.¹ The centennial announcement counts more than 5.7 billion dollars since 1949, more than 49,000 projects, and 15 funded investigators who went on to win Nobel Prizes; it also publishes 14 peer reviewed scientific journals and convenes scientific sessions each year.² The first of those journals, Circulation, began in 1950.³

Figure

A century of research

invested in cardiovascular research since 1949

5.7 billion dollars

research projects funded

49,000

funded investigators who went on to win Nobel Prizes

15

CPR and the guidelines

The association’s best known public work is resuscitation. Its history of CPR records that in 1960 three researchers combined mouth to mouth breathing with chest compressions to create cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and that the association began a program the same year to acquaint physicians with closed chest resuscitation, the forerunner of public CPR training.³ A CPR committee followed in 1963, with formal endorsement the same year; a Seattle cardiologist launched the first mass citizen training in 1972, reaching more than 100,000 people in two years; and the association published its first advanced life support textbook in 1975 and its first pediatric courses in 1988.³ The guidelines are revised on a cycle. The 2005 edition set a ratio of thirty compressions to two breaths, and in 2008 the association told bystanders who were untrained or unwilling that Hands Only CPR, uninterrupted chest compressions without rescue breaths, could save the life of an adult who collapsed suddenly.³ The 2010 guidelines marked the fiftieth anniversary of the technique.³

Advocacy and volunteers

The centennial announcement says advocacy has been central to the association’s work for more than forty years, with staff and volunteers in Washington, every state capital and local communities, early leadership on tobacco control, and sustained pressure for federal research funding through the National Institutes of Health.² The American Stroke Association is a division of the organization, created to carry the same education into stroke prevention and treatment, since heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and stroke the second.¹ The announcement also recalls the Heart Fund, when volunteers went door to door collecting from neighbors, as the origin of a model that now runs through community Heart Walks.² That reliance on local volunteers is one reason the organization appears in any account of volunteering in Nebraska.

Figure

The association and CPR

1. 01
   1924Six cardiologists meet in Chicago and form the association as a professional society for physicians
2. 02
   1960Three researchers combine rescue breathing with chest compressions to create CPR; the association starts a program to acquaint physicians with it
3. 03
   1963A CPR committee is established and the association formally endorses the technique
4. 04
   1972The first mass citizen training begins in Seattle and trains more than 100,000 people in two years
5. 05
   2005New guidelines set a compression to ventilation ratio of 30 to 2
6. 06
   2008Hands Only CPR is recommended for untrained bystanders helping an adult who collapses

The Heart Walk in Omaha

The Heart Walk is the association’s largest community event, and Omaha’s has a record of its own. KLKN reported that the Omaha Council Bluffs Heart Walk of May 2019 raised one million dollars for the association, the first time the local total had crossed into seven figures, with roughly 5,000 people gathered at Aksarben Village on the walk’s twenty fifth anniversary.⁵ The association’s statement for that day said that since the first Heart Walk in 1993 mortality from cardiovascular disease and stroke had fallen 45 percent, and that roughly 2,150 Americans still died of heart disease each day.⁵ The Omaha walk’s own page now sets the event on the downtown riverfront with one and three mile routes, and carries the statistic the organization leads with: nine out of ten people who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital do not survive, most of the time because no one nearby performed CPR.⁴

The Lincoln walk and the numbers

Lincoln has its own walk. Strictly Business reported that the 2026 Lincoln Heart Walk was set for May 9 at Antelope Park, and quoted the association’s figures that more than 350,000 out of hospital cardiac arrests occur in the United States each year, with the walk framed as a way to expand CPR training and build what the organization calls a nation of lifesavers.⁶ Among the Omaha health charities, the association’s model, a national research funder with a local walk, sits between the single building of Angels Among Us and the state community of Susan G. Komen, and the three together illustrate the range described under philanthropy in Omaha.

The vocabulary of the subject is worth knowing because the association’s public education turns on it. A heart attack is a blockage that starves part of the heart muscle of blood; a cardiac arrest is the heart stopping its effective rhythm, which is why the figures above concern survival in minutes rather than years. CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, is chest compressions with rescue breathing, and Hands Only CPR is compressions alone, the version recommended to bystanders since 2008. An AED is an automated external defibrillator, the portable device that can restore a rhythm. Cardiovascular refers to the heart and blood vessels and cerebrovascular to the vessels of the brain, the two fields the association funds. And the guidelines are the periodically revised standards for resuscitation and emergency care that the association’s volunteer experts write.