Pigs on treadmills show chronic exercise training can improve their diseased hearts.NIH funds biomedical research on heart's ability to grow new arteries
Contact: Kay Kendall, 713-677-7736, [email protected]Office of Communications, The Texas A&M University System Health Science CenterWeb address: tamushsc.tamu.edu
Pigs on treadmills show chronic exercise training can improve their diseased hearts.
COLLEGE STATION, TX--Nationally funded research at The Texas A&M University System Health Science Center (HSC) College of Medicine supports efforts to combat heart disease--the number one killer of Americans--by identifying molecular mechanisms of a healthy heart. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded a five-year grant totaling $1.8 million to Janet L. Parker, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Medical Physiology at the A&M System HSC College of Medicine. The grant is for a study by Parker's interdisciplinary team of researchers to discover the benefits of chronic exercise training on coronary artery disease (CAD).
Parker's research uses a porcine, or pig, model to test the effects of chronic exercise training on blood vessels of the heart. According to Parker, the porcine model is used because pigs and humans have a very similar coronary circulation, and both have a similar pattern of collateral development in the diseased heart.
The research consists of a controlled group of "couch-potato" or sedentary pigs and a group of pigs that run on a treadmill. By the end of a 14-week training protocol, the treadmill pigs are running over 80 minutes a day, five days a week. The studies focus on how the heart responds to coronary artery blockage by developing new blood vessels called coronary collateral arteries, and how exercise training effects the function of new and existing blood vessels. According to Parker, collateral arteries can make the difference between life and death.
"The human heart has an amazing ability to grow new blood vessels," Parker said. "A patient with coronary disease with collateral arteries has a much better chance of surviving a heart attack."
Parker's research team believes that chronic exercise training increases growth of new arteries in the diseased heart and enhances the ability of the artery to enlarge and provide increased blood flow to the restricted region of the heart. After a blockage occurs, new blood vessels grow in response to the blockage and provide blood flow to that area.
"It's clear now that exercise training is a benefit to patients with coronary disease," she says. "Exercise significantly reduces mortality not just cardiovascular mortality but all causes of mortality. We are very excited to have the opportunity to study possible cellular mechanisms for this beneficial effect and help design better treatments for coronary disease."
Parker and the team of researchers use a variety of techniques to study heart disease, which includes pharmacological and molecular techniques to study the biochemical reactions of the coronary cells of the arteries and muscles of the heart. The collaborating scientists are conducting studies in the A&M System HSC College of Medicine, and Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine and College of Education, specifically in the Department of Health and Kinesiology.
Parker received her doctoral degree from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, with her focus on physiology and cardiovascular research. She did her postdoctoral training in pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas. She has received numerous research and teaching awards and served as member and chairman of review groups for NIH and the American Heart Association. She has been teaching medical students, graduate students and allied health students in several areas of medical pharmacology and physiology since 1977.
The Texas A&M University System Health Science Center serves the state as a distributed, statewide health science center which is present in communities throughout Texas. The health science center includes five institutions which are dedicated to meeting the highest standards in health education, outreach and research: Baylor College of Dentistry, the College of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, and the School of Rural Public Health.
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