What are the future top priority questions in cardiovascular research and what new hardware needs to be developed?

The final discussion that took place at the Cardiovascular Workshop in Strasbourg in November 2008 identified the following priorities for our future research and the need to develop new dedicated cardiovascular devices. Knowledge and treatment of cardiovascular deconditioning remain limited. The prospect of very long duration space flights could lead to the emergence of new cardiovascular risks. We need to maintain our efforts to standardize our experimental protocols and analysis equipment. We continue to rely on animal models for cardiovascular research. To continue our studies we recommend developing specific tools for the space environment so that they can be made available to the scientific and medical community.