Donal S. O'Leary, Ph.D., professor and director of Cardiovascular Research in the Department of Physiology for the School of Medicine, received the $911,617 grant for his study, “Integrative Cardiovascular Control During Exercise in Hypertension.” The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute grant comes under the auspices of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the national economic stimulus package signed into law by President Barack Obama.

Common advice for those with high blood pressure includes monitoring diet and weight, and getting more exercise. For some individuals with hypertension, however, exercise that is too strenuous can over-excite the cardiovascular system, which could lead to an adverse cardiac event. Those select patients can quite literally exercise themselves into a heart attack or death if they engage in strenuous exercise, especially isometric, static exercise like lifting heavy weights or heavy snow shoveling.

“When we examined the literature, we found plenty of information on the good that exercise can do for those with hypertension, but we found almost nothing on the mechanisms mediating the cardiovascular responses to exercise in hypertension,” Dr. O’Leary said.

Dr. O’Leary theorizes that the skeletal muscles of the body, the bigger, load-bearing muscles that contain sensors that send signals to the brain during exercise, may become over-excited in hypertensive patients. Those signals, in turn, lead the brain to regulate the cardiovascular system. For some hypertension suffers, that causes constriction of the arteries and even of the heart, impeding blood flow. This can lead to myocardial ischemia, infarction and other cardiac events such as irregular heart beat.

Using an animal model, Dr. O’Leary’s research team will induce hypertension during exercise in an attempt to discover the cause and signal that over-drive the cardiovascular system, causing arterial constriction. Such a discovery could lead, he explained, to identifying patients who may be susceptible to cardiovascular events during exercise, future drug treatments for such patients and tailored exercise programs to allow these patients to exercise with minimal risk.

While Dr. O’Leary serves as principal investigator, his co-investigators are Javier A. Sala Mercado, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of Physiology and the Cardiovascular Research Institute; Tadeusz Scislo, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of the Department of Physiology; and Noreen Rossi, M.D., professor of Internal Medicine and staff physician at the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center.