(News.Wisc.edu) — For sufferers of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), maintaining healthy heart function isn’t as simple as going for a jog every morning. Patients need to do all they can to slow damage to their heart, and exercise can potentially improve their quality of life.
On the other hand, the demands of pumping blood into stiff, large arteries and narrowed small arteries means that many PAH patients bear an increased risk of overexertion, which makes prescribing the correct amount of physical activity difficult.
Now, a University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineer and colleagues hope to clear up that uncertainty in a new study seeking to quantify the impact of exercise on PAH patients.
Funded by a four-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Naomi Chesler, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at UW-Madison, will investigate the relationships between small artery narrowing, large artery stiffening and their interactions with the right side of the heart in patients with PAH.
“Most patients with pulmonary hypertension die from right heart failure, so even though the disease may be initiated in the small arteries of the lung, the impact on heart function is what’s really critical,” says Chesler.
Establishing how these factors relate to one another will allow Chesler and her team to develop a way of identifying PAH patients who can most benefit from regular exercise.
The objective will be finding identifiers that separate PAH patients who will benefit from exercise from those whose condition will worsen from it.
“We’re trying to differentiate those people who have sufficiently good interactions between the heart and the lungs from those where the heart and lungs are not working well together,” Chesler explains.
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