VA RESEARCH
VA RESEARCH Approaching a century of lighting the way
In September of 2021, a team of VA researchers added to the medical community’s growing understanding of a novel coronavirus which, just two years earlier, almost nobody knew existed. The study, reported in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, compared data from almost 90,000 people who’d recovered from the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 to data from a control group of more than 1.6 million people who had not had the virus. Among its findings was that those who had the viral disease now known as COVID-19 – even a mild or moderate case – had three times the risk of end-stage kidney disease, requiring dialysis or a kidney transplant, than the uninfected. Led by Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, the study was one of many launched within the previous year-and-a-half – some of them, like Al-Aly’s kidney study, deep dives into medical record data in search of insights about risk factors, disease pathways, and
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outcomes for COVID-19 patients; some of them clinical trials exploring vaccines or therapies for the disease; and some of them observational studies to better understand its clinical course. All of these studies, of course, were launched – and several completed – within the first 18 months of a global pandemic that severely limited the ability of professionals to work together and learn how to combat a new and bewildering disease. How such a research program came to exist, is capable of rapidly mobilizing the nation’s foremost clinical experts against a deadly disease, and learns from hundreds of thousands of volunteer participants, is a story that reaches deeper into American history than most people realize. Now nearly a century old – older than the National Institutes of Health – the research program of the Veterans Health Administration, now housed within the Office of Research and Development (ORD), funds more than 2,250 total projects, partners with more than 200 medical schools and other institutions, and supports the work
PHOTO BY MITCH MIRKIN
By Craig Collins
