Grant: Project Grant

Women develop cardiovascular disorders as much as men do but often later in life. Heart failure presentation is also different for them. The heart becomes stiffer and has blood filling impairment although contractility remains normal. We do not dispose of a therapeutic arsenal for this form of heart failure. Our project aims at studying the respective impact of sex hormones (estrogens or androgens) and the biological sex (being male or female) on the evolution towards failure of mouse hearts exposed to a chronic and abnormal resistance to blood ejection. New transgenic mouse models are now available to address this question discriminating between the effects of hormones (or the loss of them as in women after menopause), being male and female and the contribution of sex chromosomes (XY for males or XX for females) and the genes they harbour. In addition, we propose to study mice later in life, which is seldom done in preclinical research. We will rely on advanced imaging techniques (echocardiography), histology, molecular and biochemical analyses to discriminate between the relative contribution of sex hormones and sex chromosomes in heart failure.