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.
Christopher Nguyen, PhD, is an investigator at Mass General’s Cardiovascular Research Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. The Nguyen Lab is using advanced imaging techniques to learn more about the underlying mechanisms of the heart, with the hope of identifying new strategies to treat and prevent heart failure, and make cardiovascular imaging faster and easier.
Learn more about Dr. Nguyen’s research in the Q&A below.
What Key Heart-Related Research Question Are You Investigating Right Now?
We are currently investigating three key research questions. One is how exercise therapy can prevent heart failure. Currently, heart failure is the fastest growing cardiovascular disease with one in eight Americans dying from the disease.
Many exciting therapeutics are being developed, but we do not have anything in clinical routine that can completely reverse heart failure. Thus, we are looking into lifestyle modifications to prevent the disease and one of these modifications is exercise.
Exercise was very appealing to us because virtually anyone has access to it and has beneficial effects beyond improving heart health such as improvements in cognitive function and reducing the impact of cancer.
Our goal is to reveal how the underlying molecular mechanisms of exercise therapy manifest into tangible changes in the heart thereby finding the optimal exercise routine to impact heart health.
Another question we’re looking into is reducing cardiac inflammation with ketone metabolism. Ketones have been the subject of many dietary trends in America for weight loss, but we are just beginning to realize their role in reducing the effects of inflammation. Our group is investigating how ketones can potentially reduce inflammation to treat heart attacks in the acute time frame.
Treatment of heart attacks have made huge strides, but unfortunately patients who survive heart attacks develop a scarred heart, which eventually turns into heart failure. Our hope is that reducing inflammation soon after heart attack will stop the progression of the scar and thus prevent heart failure.
The last question we are investigating is how can we automate cardiac MRI so that it’s faster, cheaper, and easier to perform?
Currently, cardiac MRI is the gold-standard test to assess the function of the heart and visualize tissue damage from heart disease. However, it routinely takes over 60 minutes to complete an exam requiring complex acquisition schemes and hundreds of breath holds by the patient. Our goal is to develop an artificial intelligence algorithm to automatically provide a free-breathing, push-button cardiac MRI scan.
What is Unique About Your Approach?
Our group mostly focuses on leveraging the power of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in conjunction with cutting edge molecular technologies. MRI is a clinically routine diagnostic tool and can be immediately performed in patients. This allows us a unique chance to rapidly translate our technologies into the clinic as we answer fundamental biomedical questions about the heart.
What Do You Love About Studying the Heart?
The heart is the most amazing organ we have in our body. As an engineer and physicist, I am just in awe of how it’s able to sustain life given how small it is compared to the rest of the body. Over a lifetime, the human heart can beat over a billion times, while being no bigger than the size our fist.
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