How the Heart Adapts to Exercise

So my research focuses on examining how the heart adapts to exercise, specifically how the heart enlarges due to exercise. We see that in people who exercise vigorously - cardiac chambers become enlarged and the heart muscle thickens, also known as left ventricular hypertrophy. We're interested in two things:

One is to better understand the mechanisms of left ventricular hypertrophy due to exercise. The thought is that if we can better understand the mechanisms of this process we might better understand how exercise might be used to benefit people with cardiac disease. There's also a more direct clinical application of my work.

So a common scenario in our clinic is that an athlete presents either because they have symptoms or because they've had some abnormal findings on cardiac exams and they're found to have heart muscle thickening or left ventricular hypertrophy and it's not clear whether that's just due to their exercise or due to some pathologic process.

Most commonly the concern would be for a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. And with the current clinical tools we have, it's sometimes very hard to distinguish between normal athletic remodeling and cardiac disease.

There are huge clinical implications to this because forms of cardiac disease that cause LVH like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy are the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in athletes. So you really need to get the diagnosis correct and check to the best cardiologist near you so my work looks at whether some forms of cardiac imaging, specifically PET imaging, can help tell the difference between left ventricular hypertrophy due to exercise and due to cardiac disease..

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