Grant: Project Grant

Heart disease is a broad health concern for all post industrial societies. A consistent feature to the many variants of cardiac illness is the inappropriate enlargement of heart muscle, commonly referred to as pathologic cardiac hypertrophy. This variant of heart disease is also a common step in the transition to heart failure, an illness with limited treatments and a poor prognosis. The heart also grows in a beneficial way, termed physiologic hypertrophy, a form of growth that is observed with exercise training and pregnancy. Physiologic hypertrophy can also counter the pathologic form of growth and slow the transition to overt heart failure. Although these forms of heart muscle growth result in very distinct outcomes, work from our laboratory suggests that the same biochemical pathway is critical for both forms of hypertrophy. In fact, our observations suggest that pathologic hypertrophy may simple be the result of 'turning on' this pathway for longer periods of time. In our current research application, we will focus on understanding how this biochemical pathway promotes physiologic vs pathologic hypertrophy, and whether this pathway stimulates the unique protein activity for each condition. We anticipate, that the information obtained from these experiments will identify proteins that can be targeted to mitigate the onset of pathologic hypertrophy and/or promote the beneficial form of cardiac growth.