New $7 million award makes university home to environmental cardiology

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded UofL the university's first ever NIH Program Project Grant to support work in a new research discipline: environmental cardiology. The grant, a $7 million, five-year award, will fund four projects as well as related core services and laboratories.

According to Aruni Bhatnagar, Ph.D., project leader and a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UofL, various epidemiologic studies over the last decade have shown a link between air pollution and daily mortality rates.

"We know that on days when there is a significant increase in air pollution, there is about a 6 percent increase in mortality over the next 24 hours -- most of those being cardiopulmonary deaths," he explained.

"Of the 300,000 sudden cardiac deaths each year, it is now estimated that 60,000 to 80,000 of those may be linked to air pollution. However, there have been few controlled physiologic studies to determine the nature of a causal relationship between specific components of air pollution and the progression of heart disease."

All four projects funded by the grant will involve determining the various effects of different aldehydes on cardiac cellular or systematic function.

Aldehydes are a group of chemicals that can be found in high quantities in vehicle exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke. In most cities, aldehydes make up more than 50 percent of organic air pollution. High levels of these chemicals also have been detected in fried foods, fats and drinking water.

The projects seek to answer four basic questions regarding the cardiotoxicity of aldehydes:

• How do cardiovascular tissues metabolize aldehydes and how does the cardiovascular system handle the challenge of foreign chemicals?
• How, and how quickly, do aldehydes accelerate the progression of heart disease?
• How do aldehydes interact with blood cells to cause cardiac and vascular inflammation?
• How do high levels of aldehydes raise the risk of heart attack and worsen heart failure?

The principal investigators of the projects are Bhatnagar; Stanley D'Souza, Ph.D, physiology; Sumanth Prabhu, M.D., cardiology; and Russell Prough, Ph.D., biochemistry -- all professors at UofL.

A key element to the success of the projects and to winning the PPG award is the presence of leading-edge core laboratories. UofL's bioanalytical core laboratory, directed by William Pierce Jr., Ph.D., will use mass spectrometry technologies to perform molecular structural analysis for all four projects.

An additional core, which will provide controlled inhalation exposures, is managed by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Jewish Hospital will provide infrastructure support.

"To be selected as the scientific 'birthplace' for environmental cardiology -- an entirely new discipline -- demonstrates the level of research excellence and national recognition that UofL has achieved," said UofL President James R. Ramsey, Ph.D.

"Dr. Bhatnagar and the team of scientists recognized by this award are scientific and academic leaders in every sense of the word."