About the research project
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the greatest cause of morbidity worldwide, and high blood pressure (BP) is the number one risk factor for CVD. One in three Tasmanian adults has high BP, the highest prevalence in Australia. Many more have undiagnosed or inadequately managed high BP, further increasing CVD risk. Thus, we have an urgent and currently unmet need for improved and easily implemented methods for better detection and management of high BP and its associated CVD risk.
Work of the supervisory team has demonstrated that abnormally raised BP during clinical exercise testing, called ‘exercise hypertension’, is a signal for CVD events and death. This CVD risk may, however, not be detected in up to 50% of individuals using traditional methods of BP assessment at rest. Thus, exercise BP offers a unique opportunity to identify individuals at high risk for BP-related CVD.
Several factors (including, but not limited to, functional capacity – ‘fitness’) have been shown to influence exercise BP, and its subsequent association with CVD outcomes. The relationship between exercise BP and functional capacity suggests there may be both pathological and physiological pathways to generating abnormal exercise BP. Physiological insight to the cardiac structure and function that underpins these differential BP responses to exercise, as well as the associated longer-term CVD risk is lacking (the supervisor team recently wrote an invited review article on this issue).
The proposed PhD program will address this key knowledge gap relating to exercise BP with the goal to understand how fitness mediates the relationship between elevated exercise BP and CVD risk. Data to address the project aims will be drawn from the EXERcise stress Test collaboratION (EXERTION) study, a collaborative established by the supervisory team to enhance clinical understanding of abnormal exercise BP.