February is American Heart Month, an opportunity to raise awareness about the health impacts of heart disease and to spotlight the innovative ways that Mass General researchers are working to tackle these challenges. Throughout the month, we’ll be spotlighting different areas of cardiovascular research at Mass General and sharing tips for living a healthier, heart-friendly life.
Did you know that stress and depression can increase your risk of heart disease just as much as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and smoking?
Mass General researchers Michael Osborne, MD, and Ahmed Tawakol, MD, are working to learn more about the connections between the two, and to identify new treatment strategies. Learn more about their work in the Q&A below, and stay tuned for more heart health research stories throughout February.
Michael Osborne, MD
Physician-Investigator,
Cardiovascular Research Center
Instructor in Medicine,
Harvard Medical School
What key heart-related research questions are you investigating right now?
Our group is focused on improving the understanding of the mechanisms by which neural pathways can trigger cardiovascular disease. For example, we are studying how chronic stress can lead to heart attacks and strokes.
We’ve identified a multi-organ pathway that begins with stress-related brain activity, resulting in excess activation of the sympathetic and immune systems, which trigger cardiovascular changes leading to heart attacks.
While we recognize that it is difficult to reduce stressors that people are exposed to, we hope to identify ways to limit the adverse physiologic manifestations of stress that cause heart disease.
For example, we’re evaluating how healthy lifestyle factors, such as sleep and exercise, quiet this disease-causing pathway. We are additionally studying compounds that may impact that pathway.
Further, we’re studying how a stress reduction intervention (offered by the Benson-Henry Institute at MGH) impacts stress-associated brain activity, inflammation, and artery disease.
We hope that work in the field will eventually improve understanding of the mechanisms and identify effective interventions. Moreover, we hope that those findings may soon help humans live healthier lives by lessening the burden of stress-associated cardiovascular disease.
What is unique about your approach?
We use advanced multi-modality, multi-organ imaging (from magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography) to gain insights into how psychosocial stress leads to cardiovascular disease.
We combine these tools with genetic and biochemical measures, along with detailed lifestyle and environmental data. Imaging provides detailed information on simultaneous metabolic activities and structures of various organs to understand their interplay in disease processes.
For example, we have previously shown that increased activity of stress-associated brain regions associates with greater activity of inflammatory tissues (such as the bone marrow) and greater inflammation of the arteries. We are now using these same tools to identify the impact of interventions on this pathway.
Additionally, we are applying this approach to very large biobank cohorts (including over 100,000 participants) using lifestyle and genetic data to improve our understanding of how these factors impact the relationship between stress and cardiovascular disease.
What do you love about studying the heart?
We are passionate about developing a better understanding of, and discovering better ways to interrupt, pathways that link stress-associated brain activity to heart disease.
While it has long been assumed that stress adversely impacts health, there has been limited progress in understanding how this occurs and, importantly, how it could be prevented.
We and others have learned that stress (and depression) are as potent risk factors for heart disease as diabetes, smoking, hypertension and high cholesterol. Nonetheless, relatively little attention is paid to stress or depression as disease risk factors, perhaps because the mechanisms linking them to disease have been poorly understood.
We hope that work in the field will eventually improve understanding of the mechanisms and identify effective interventions. Moreover, we hope that those findings may soon help humans live healthier lives by lessening the burden of stress-associated cardiovascular disease.
Ahmed Tawakol, MD
Physician-Investigator,
Cardiovascular Research Center
Associate Professor of Medicine,
Harvard Medical School
About the Mass General Research Institute
Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. Our researchers work side-by-side with physicians to develop innovative new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease.
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