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Heidi Collins is providing the basis for non-pharmacological therapies for cardiovascular disease. Using hypertensive rats in the laboratory, she has shown that even a single bout of exercise will reduce high blood pressure and sympathetic activity to the heart, both risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

“Even mild exercise has an immediate effect on blood pressure,” Dr. Collins said. “This is very beneficial for people who are hypertensive, because it provides evidence that behavior modification can reduce their risk for a deadly disease.”

After earning her PhD from Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in 1997, Dr. Collins came to Wayne State for post-doctoral training. She became an assistant professor of physiology in 2000 and has just landed her first National Institutes of Health grant to study “Mechanisms of Arrhythmia Suppression by Exercise Training.”

“We know that people with cardiovascular disease have an increased incidence of ventricular arrhythmias. Now, we are trying to determine if exercise training can reduce that incidence. We suspect that exercise training alters the genes responsible for calcium handling, which lowers calcium in the heart and thus lowers the chance of developing arrhythmias,” she said.

This research is being done in collaboration with Dr. James Marsh, an expert in molecular cardiology and calcium transport. Unlike related studies, their work is done on conscious, rather than anesthetized animals, eliminating the confounding factors of anesthesia.

“These studies are a bold new endeavor linking molecular pathways to functional pathways,” she said. The laboratory work is immediately applicable to humans, whose cardiovascular system works and responds in the same way.

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