Daniel Levy

Daniel Levy:

Daniel Levy is a cardiologist who is the director of the Framingham Heart Study at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is also Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. He is known for his research on the epidemiology and genetics of heartfailure and hypertension.^[1]

Levy received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 and his M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine in 1980. He then completed his internal medicine residency at University Hospital, Boston, as well as a research fellowship in cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health. He began working for the Framingham Heart Study in 1984 and became its director in 1994.^[2]

Levy has received two NIH Director’s Awards, as well as the American Heart Association’s Population Research Prize. He is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association, as well as a member of the American Society of Hypertension and Heart Failure Society of America. He is the editor-in-chief of the journals Current Cardiovascular Risk Reports and the Journal of the American Society of Hypertension.

Daniel Levy

MD

Framingham, MA

Specialty / Subspecialties: Cardiology / General Cardiology, Adult Congenital Heart Disease

About Dr. Daniel Levy, MD :

Dr. Daniel Levy is a cardiologist in Framingham, Massachusetts. He received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 years.

Years of Practice:

21+

Gender:

Male

Languages:

English

Specialty:

cardiology

Research Topics

Dr. Levy’s main areas of research interest include the epidemiology and genetics of cardiovascular disease, with a focus on coronary disease, hypertension, and heart failure. He aims to merge the robust clinical and longitudinal data available from the Framingham Heart Study with the latest advances in genomic sciences to gain insight into the complex relations between complex cardiovascular traits and the onset of heart disease.

Dr. Levy was recently part of an international consortium that identified 29 genetic variants that influence blood pressure and heart disease risk, included 16 previously unrecognized variants found in both expected and unexpected locations. Another smaller scale study identified the genetic variants in the mitochondrial genome potentially associated with blood pressure and fasting glucose levels. These and other efforts have provided new clues into how blood pressure is regulated.

Dr. Levy has also had a long-standing interest in the causes and manifestations of heart failure. Using the Framingham cohort and others,  he has conducted extensive studies into the development of heart failure, as well as studies examining the clinical differences in risk factors and prognosis of people with heart failure in the setting of preserved versus reduced ejection fractions. One of his most recent discoveries was identifying galectin-3, a protein associated with cardiac fibrosis, as a predictor of heart failure.

Most recently, Dr. Levy has begun spearheading a new research program known as the SABRe CVD (Systems Approach to Biomarker Research in Cardiovascular Disease) Initiative, which seeks to identify new biomarkers and pathways involved in cardiovascular disease through the introduction of discovery proteomics and metabolomics, and gene expression and microRNA profiling. These resources will be united with the Framingham Study’s unparalleled genetic and phenotypic databases and will be made freely accessible to the scientific community at large. With these new resources available, Dr. Levy and his colleagues hope to contribute research discoveries to improve the options for primary and secondary prevention of coronary heart disease.

Selected Publications

1. Mendelson MM, Marioni RE, Joehanes R, Liu C, Hedman ÅK, Aslibekyan S, Demerath EW, Guan W, Zhi D, Yao C, Huan T, Willinger C, Chen B, Courchesne P, Multhaup M, Irvin MR, Cohain A, Schadt EE, Grove ML, Bressler J, North K, Sundström J, Gustafsson S, Shah S, McRae AF, Harris SE, Gibson J, Redmond P, Corley J, Murphy L, Starr JM, Kleinbrink E, Lipovich L, Visscher PM, Wray NR, Krauss RM, Fallin D, Feinberg A, Absher DM, Fornage M, Pankow JS, Lind L, Fox C, Ingelsson E, Arnett DK, Boerwinkle E, Liang L, Levy D, Deary IJ. Association of Body Mass Index with DNA Methylation and Gene Expression in Blood Cells and Relations to Cardiometabolic Disease: A Mendelian Randomization Approach. PLoS Med. 2017;14(1):e1002215.


2. Liu C, Marioni RE, Hedman ÅK, Pfeiffer L, Tsai PC, Reynolds LM, Just AC, Duan Q, Boer CG, Tanaka T, Elks CE, Aslibekyan S, Brody JA, Kühnel B, Herder C, Almli LM, Zhi D, Wang Y, Huan T, Yao C, Mendelson MM, Joehanes R, Liang L, Love SA, Guan W, Shah S, McRae AF, Kretschmer A, Prokisch H, Strauch K, Peters A, Visscher PM, Wray NR, Guo X, Wiggins KL, Smith AK, Binder EB, Ressler KJ, Irvin MR, Absher DM, Hernandez D, Ferrucci L, Bandinelli S, Lohman K, Ding J, Trevisi L, Gustafsson S, Sandling JH, Stolk L, Uitterlinden AG, Yet I, Castillo-Fernandez JE, Spector TD, Schwartz JD, Vokonas P, Lind L, Li Y, Fornage M, Arnett DK, Wareham NJ, Sotoodehnia N, Ong KK, van Meurs JBJ, Conneely KN, Baccarelli AA, Deary IJ, Bell JT, North KE, Liu Y, Waldenberger M, London SJ, Ingelsson E, Levy D. A DNA methylation biomarker of alcohol consumption. Mol Psychiatry. 2018;23(2):422-433.


3. Yao C, Chen G, Song C, Keefe J, Mendelson M, Huan T, Sun BB, Laser A, Maranville JC, Wu H, Ho JE, Courchesne P, Lyass A, Larson MG, Gieger C, Graumann J, Johnson AD, Danesh J, Runz H, Hwang SJ, Liu C, Butterworth AS, Suhre K, Levy D. Genome-wide mapping of plasma protein QTLs identifies putatively causal genes and pathways for cardiovascular disease. Nat Commun. 2018;9(1):3268.


4. Yao C, Joehanes R, Johnson AD, Huan T, Liu C, Freedman JE, Munson PJ, Hill DE, Vidal M, Levy D. Dynamic Role of trans Regulation of Gene Expression in Relation to Complex Traits. Am J Hum Genet. 2017;100(4):571-580.


5. Joehanes R, Zhang X, Huan T, Yao C, Ying SX, Nguyen QT, Demirkale CY, Feolo ML, Sharopova NR, Sturcke A, Schäffer AA, Heard-Costa N, Chen H, Liu PC, Wang R, Woodhouse KA, Tanriverdi K, Freedman JE, Raghavachari N, Dupuis J, Johnson AD, O'Donnell CJ, Levy D, Munson PJ. Integrated genome-wide analysis of expression quantitative trait loci aids interpretation of genomic association studies. Genome Biol. 2017;18(1):16.