Head Start on Healthy Heart
Stress may impede the heart’s ability to relax and fill with blood – a theory that, if correct, may help predict congestive heart failure, according to Dr. Gaston Kakota Kapuku, an MCG cardiovascular researcher. Dr. Kapuku is recruiting 160 teens for a four-year American Heart Association study to see if stress-induced high blood pressure impacts the heart’s ability to relax and fill with blood.
Congestive heart failure, the inability of the heart to efficiently pump blood, results from years of working against elevated pressures inside blood vessels. But the heart must relax to fill with blood, and Dr. Kapuku was among the first to identify a malfunction in this process as an early sign of heart disease.
MCG’s Georgia Prevention Institute has already identified abnormal sodium retention and blood pressure that remains elevated after stress subsides as risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Using teens with genetic tendencies for these risk factors, Dr. Kapuku will study their heart function following video game-induced stress to determine whether the heart’s
blood-filling mechanism provides an early predictor of congestive heart failure—and therefore, a head start on prevention and treatment.