Two important grants for Maastricht UMC+ researchers, Uyen Chau Nguyen and Martijn Hoes. They received a Dekker grant from the Heart Foundation for their research in the field of cardiovascular disease.
Dekker grants are personal grants from the Heart Foundation for young, talented researchers. This gives them the opportunity to develop further in the field of research into cardiovascular diseases.
Life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia
Uyen Chau Nguyen – cardiologist in training and researcher receives €245,000 for research into arrhythmias in heart failure. Nguyen studies patients with heart failure due to impaired electrical conduction pathways: ‘In a healthy person, these pathways direct the heart, causing the ventricles to contract and the heart to beat. If the conduction pathways are affected, patients are given a special pacemaker (cardiac resynchronization therapy) to control the heart properly again. For the majority of patients, this is successful and restores pumping power. Only a small proportion, about 6%, develop life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias within a year of implantation. I want to map out why this disorder arises, whether it has to do with the pacemaker and whether we can prevent it,” says Nguyen. In the Netherlands, more than 2100 people receive this type of pacemaker every year. find out how some of them develop this arrhythmia,” said the researcher.
Heart failure during pregnancy
Biomedical scientist Martijn Hoes receives €270,000 for research into heart failure due to pregnancy. About one in three thousand pregnant women in the Netherlands develops a serious form of heart failure in the last trimester of pregnancy or in the months after childbirth. Martijn Hoes investigates why this is the case: ”About half of the women who develop this form of heart failure make a full recovery, but the rest remain heart failure patients. A smaller part, about 6%, even dies. At the moment it is still a mystery how this heart failure arises, while we do know that it has an enormous impact on mother, child and family.” With the Dekker grant, Hoes can unravel heart failure in pregnant women: “We do our research completely. in the lab. We cultured heart muscle cells based on skin biopsies from patients. In those cells we have seen that the metabolism differs from healthy relatives. So we think pregnancy hormones can disrupt heart cells. We are now going to study this in simulated heart pieces based on the cultured heart muscle cells. In this way we hope to be able to explain, treat or even prevent heart failure.”