American Heart Association history

This gave way to other public interests donating money and resources to the AHA. It wasn’t until the late 1930’s that AHA begun looking at ways to extend their activities to reach the public.

AHA celebrates the first National Heart Week in 1947! One year later, AHA restructures from a scientific society to a voluntary health organization.

The AHA reorganized in 1948 and enlisted the help of non medical volunteers with specialization in business, communication, education and fund raising.

For the first time in history, a heart is returned to a steady rhythm by an external defibrillator in a study funded by the AHA in 1956.

The AHA Council on Community Service and Education then established in 1958 a Committee on Epidemiological Studies to forward the activities of its epidemiologist members.

The first Chicago conference in 1960 was also critical to “bonding” among the group.

The AHA continues to make an impact in 1961 when a funded research project is reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the effectiveness of CPR in saving lives after cardiac arrest.

The official AHA announcement came in the Council Letter, Summer 1964 issue.

The AHA went through another major change in the mid 1990’s where the scientific research findings began to move quickly from laboratories and clinics to doctor’s offices and the public.

Legend: Past chairs of the AHA Council on Epidemiology and Prevention, gathered at the annual scientific sessions in Anaheim, California, in 1991.

The Association’s support of his now Nobel Prize winning work on HIF-1 began in 1993.

(An extended history of the AHA Council is found in Circulation 4: 1253, 1995.)

Founded in 1998, Mission Search Corporation began as a recruiting and consulting company for hospitals in Florida.

At that time, Leonard Cook, AHA statistician, received a “permanent appointment” to staff the council on Epidemiology, which he held through 2004, for 40 years!

Nobel Prize Awarded to Early AHA-Funded Researcher: Doctor Martin Chalfie wins the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing green fluorescent protein as a genetic tag to see inside living cells, including heart cells, to better understand how the cells are made and how they work.

AHA Grantee wins Nobel Prize: Gregg L. Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University was co-awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of how cells sense and acclimate to oxygen availability, the mechanism for one of life’s most essential adaptive processes.