Inside Duke Medicine

AHA Heart Walk draws hundreds from Duke

Sunday, Oct. 19 was a perfect day for a walk.

Under blue skies, hundreds of Duke Medicine employees gathered in Research Triangle Park for the annual American Heart Association (AHA) Start! Triangle Heart Walk.

Clad in blue-green tie-dyed T-shirts, the team walked the mile and 2.5-mile courses with thousands of others from area companies as a way to raise funds for the AHA.

Heart Walk organizers will be collecting and counting donations for a few more weeks, but the Duke Medicine team had raised at least $114,000 of its $175,000 goal by Nov. 1.

“All of us know how important it is to take personal charge of your heart health,” said Victor J. Dzau, M.D., chancellor for health affairs and CEO of Duke University Health System, in opening remarks.

He highlighted Duke’s platinum designation as an AHA Fit-Friendly company.

Duke volunteers also provided free health screenings for blood pressure and cholesterol to some 200 individuals that day.

Other volunteers passed out a brand-new Duke Medicine Closer to You Location Map that shows more than 100 Duke clinics spread across North Carolina.

Duke employee Tiwatha Godley, nursing care assistant II at the Ambulatory Surgery Center at North Pavilion, was named by the AHA Triangle chapter as the Lifestyle Change Award Winner.

Godley had seen a picture of herself, didn’t like what she saw, and started walking on Dec. 28, 2005. Now she’s a 100 pounds lighter, and she recently finished her first half-marathon.

“I just want to make a difference for someone with my story,” she wrote in her submission letter.

The Heart Walk is one of the nation’s premier walking events. It combines physical activity, community involvement and personal giving to fight the nation’s No. 1 and No. 3 killers – cardiovascular diseases and stroke.

The event is a non-competitive walk to celebrate survivors of heart disease and stroke, encourage walking and physical activity as part of a healthy lifestyle, educate the public about the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease and stroke, and raise money for biomedical research, education and outreach programs.

Heart disease and stroke kill more than 930,000 Americans each year. In North Carolina, nearly 24,000 die every year from cardiovascular disease – or one death every 22 minutes.