Cardiovascular aims
The cardiovascular theme aims to prevent premature death and reduce the severity of illness due to heart diseases through: early diagnosis, improving the ways to predict which patients are at high risk; better understanding of disease progression, and identifying efficient therapies and personalising treatments so they are more effective for the individual.
We do this through use of advanced technologies, data integration and analytics to better understand disease mechanisms, improve risk stratification and develop targeted interventions based on disease endotypes. We collaborate with national and international partners, including industry, and incorporate meaningful patient and public involvement, engagement and participation at all stages.
Our core research areas
- Genomics
- Imaging
- Heart Failure and multimorbidities, or multiple long term conditions (MLTC)
- Arrhythmias
- Vascular Diseases
- Cardiac Surgery
- Rarer coronary syndromes -in particular SCAD
- Stroke
We aim to:
- Continue our genomic discovery programmes in common and rarer cardiovascular diseases to further our understanding of the real-world benefits of cardiovascular diseases polygenic risk scores (PRSs).
- Understand the genetic, lifestyle and environmental determinants and clinical consequences of telomere length variation to develop novel strategies to help prevent or improve age-associated diseases.
- Apply novel techniques and multi-organ imaging to better characterise cardiovascular diseases and improve diagnostic accuracy.
- Identify candidate pathways associated with improved ejection fraction, using multi-omic phenotyping of existing cohorts.
- Develop non-invasive markers using exercise and artificial intelligence and assess whether they can predict ventricular arrhythmia events and improve risk stratification.
- Develop interventions for frailty and cognitive impairment and a self-management intervention to improve cardiovascular risk in people with peripheral arterial diseases.
- Investigate molecular phenotypes associated with post-cardiac surgery organ injury, test interventions targeting energy availability to reduce organ injury in the elderly MLTC phenogroup.
- Extend our understanding of Spontaneous coronary artery disease by combining large UK/European registries with deep phenotyping studies, and build on our genetic studies to identify therapeutic targets to reduce the risk of SCAD.
- Integrate studies and develop acute stroke phenotyping using large datasets coupled with artificial intelligence/multivariate clustering techniques to better risk stratify, and develop clinical interventions to improve stroke outcomes.