George Institute researchers among winners of Heart Foundation grants
Three researchers from The George Institute for Global Health have successfully secured funding from the Heart Foundation for innovative projects designed to shift the dial on coronary heart disease, which remains the leading cause of death in Australia with 17,000 deaths annually.
This year's Heart Foundation funded projects tackle some of the most challenging mysteries in cardiovascular diseases (CVD). They champion advancements in the prevention, treatment, and management of heart disease, stroke, and blood vessel disease.
Dr Kathy Trieu, recipient of the Future Leader Fellowship grant, is scaling up innovative interventions to improve healthy eating and heart health in Australia.
Poor diet is one of the leading risk factors for death, contributing to around 1 in 5 deaths worldwide, primarily from CVD.
Dr Trieu’s four-year research program will focus on two promising interventions to improve diets and prevent CVD among vulnerable groups. The first will explore the use of potassium-enriched salt among consumers and by food manufacturers to help lower blood pressure and reduce heart disease risk.
The second approach will look at "Food is Medicine" programs, which allow healthcare professionals to ‘prescribe’ nutritious foods at low or no cost as part of medical treatment and to enable healthy eating, particularly for people experiencing food insecurity (e.g. difficulty accessing or affording foods).
In both cases, the team will seek solutions to challenges in implementing these strategies in a way that is effective and feasible in Australia.
Dr Lauren Houston is looking to innovate women’s cardiovascular health by combining heart screening with routine mammograms.
CVD (heart disease) typically presents differently in women than in men and is under-diagnosed and under-treated. These ‘female’ symptoms can often go overlooked until it’s too late, placing women at higher risk of a major cardiovascular event. Women are also less likely than men to be screened for heart disease by a GP.
Mammograms are already routinely adopted by around 50% of women in high CVD risk age groups, but new technology means they can also yield important new information, such as calcification of the arteries and breast tissue density, that are markers for increased heart disease risk.
Dr Houston’s team will involve first surveying healthcare professionals to assess the feasibility of the plan and then piloting the use of existing breast screening infrastructure to identify women at risk of heart disease.
If successful, the NSW pilot could expand nationally and integrate with the existing mammogram system – effectively delivering a '2 for 1' benefit for women across Australia.
Dr Nelson Wang is setting out to answer a critical question – is it better to measure risk factors more or less to best manage heart disease?
Optimal management of high cholesterol and high blood pressure (BP) – two big risk factors for heart disease – remains a major challenge in combating CVD, with both issues affecting 1 in 3 Australian adults.
Currently, doctors are expected to personalise treatment based on an individual’s measurements, but these can be difficult to quantify as clinicians can be misled by random fluctuations as both cholesterol and BP are intrinsically variable. Reluctance to intensify treatment, 80-90% of the time even when the conditions are shown to be uncontrolled, contributes to poor control rates across the board.
To address this, Dr. Wang’s team will test the impact of two radically different strategies. One seeks to enhance the quality and frequency of BP and cholesterol testing by providing access to gold standard ambulatory BP monitors and serial lipid measurements. On the flipside, the other will look to minimise testing by using established clinical trial data to guide treatment decisions. By evaluating and comparing the relative effectiveness of these strategies in primary care, the findings will contribute to the design of a larger, randomised clinical trial in the future.