TIME100 Health Panel Discusses Efforts to Prevent Heart Disease

At the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner in New York on Thursday, TIME editor-in-chief Nikhil Kumar kicked off a panel discussion with a big question: Why is heart disease still the leading cause of death among men and women?

“Perhaps before we answer the question of why it is the leading cause of death today,” replied Dr. Sadiya Khan, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology and associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, “we need to know where we started.”

She began by telling a story: In 1945, when President Franklin Roosevelt died, his death seemed “sudden and unexpected,” Khan said. But looking at his doctors’ notes, Khan said, it’s clear he had high blood pressure for years and was going untreated.

“None of us would sit on this today,” Khan said. “We know now that we can treat blood pressure. We can add years, decades to life by treating blood pressure. But we’re still not getting there. And we’re still not getting that success.”

Millions of people in the United States have high blood pressure, but many do not receive adequate treatment, Khan said. “So I think the answer is: We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”

Khan, who was included on the TIME100 Health 2026 list for her work in early cardiovascular risk assessment, was joined on stage Thursday by Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of health and wellness company Thrive Global, and Victor Bultó, president of Novartis US, which sponsored the New York event.

Kumar turned the discussion over to Bultó, asking why Novartis has not only developed therapies to combat heart disease, but also moved toward human behavior. Bultó, who was also included on the TIME100 Health 2026 list, said the technology capable of reducing cardiovascular risk events and adding years to many people’s lives already exists, but is not being used.

“We had to move from just being a medical science company to a social science company in order to understand what the underlying behavior is that actually underpins this,” he said.

Bultó said his team learned that humans tend to be “programmed to accept the dopamine hit from something that gives us pleasure today and ignore all the damage it’s going to cause in the future.” Today, experts are calling for a better understanding of how people can change these behaviors.

Khan also spoke about her efforts to target young women to help them avoid cardiovascular problems later in life. She said that for many young women, health care is often focused on pregnancy. And many women experience complications during pregnancy, such as high blood pressure, preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes. She suffered from gestational diabetes herself and didn’t realize it was linked to heart disease.

“We’re learning a lot more that these early markers can actually be signals and a wake-up call for the future. And the important thing is not that this is scary or that it means I’m going to have a heart attack, but that I can do something now,” Khan said. “I can focus on the health behaviors that are going to prevent this from progressing and really make a difference. And with this information, we can empower people – young women, young men – to really take charge of their own health much sooner than we thought.”

“I mean, even today, if you Google heart attack or heart disease, you get a picture of an elderly person, and that’s not where we should be,” she continued. “We need to start much earlier.”

Huffington called it “inspiring” that Khan, a prominent physician, and Bultó, the head of a major pharmaceutical company, were willing to talk about the impact that medications and behaviors can have on human health.