Study summary. This exciting project aims to investigate the effect of acute hypoxemia on cardiac repolarization of human subjects with different morbidities. Sufferers of chronic conditions that impair the delivery of oxygen to the heart are at increased risk of fatal ventricular arrythmias. The QT-interval on an electrocardiogram (ECG) has been studied as a measure of cardiac repolarization. Increases in the duration of this interval are strongly associated with ventricular arrhythmogenesis and sudden cardiac death. Propensity to QT interval prolongation can be inherited or acquired. While inherited long-QT syndromes are rare, it is well established that acquired long-QT can be caused by certain medications. More recently, mounting epidemiological evidence suggests an association between hypoxemia and QT interval prolongation. This is highly relevant from a population health perspective since multiple pathologies can cause hypoxemia or local tissue hypoxia, acutely or chronically, including sleep disordered breathing, atherosclerosis and heart failure. However, few functional studies have investigated the link between acute hypoxemia and long-QT in humans. Moreover, there is little understanding of the role that comorbidities, sex differences and exercise may play on susceptibility to long-QT induced by acute hypoxemia. Thus, this dry lab project aims to retrospectively analyse the effect of controlled acute hypoxemia on QT-interval in males and females from different study cohorts, including healthy subjects and patients presenting with different morbidities (e.g. hypertension and heart failure).
The team. This unique team of supervisors includes two basic scientists and a clinical researcher. Dr Abdala Sheikh is an expert in pre-clinical integrative physiology. In her research, she combines in vivo and ex vivo physiology, electrophysiology, molecular and computational approaches to study diseases that affect autonomic control. Dr Harmer is an expert electrophysiologist and uses cutting edge molecular and stem cell technologies to investigate inherited cardiac channelopathies. Dr Hart is an expert in clinical physiology studies in humans and has an interest in cardiovascular autonomic control in hypertension and heart failure.
What you will learn. During this project you will gain training and experience in clinical physiology studies, governance of human derived data, analysis of cardiovascular parameters, computational methods (coding for data analysis) and statistical analysis of clinical data. There will also be ample opportunities to gain hands-on experience in human experimentation by contributing to ongoing clinical studies from the team.
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