The Heart Foundation has awarded researcher Dr Sebastian Weingärtner of TU Delft a Dekker grant. This is a personal research grant for talented scientists that is awarded annually. With the grant of 490,000 euros, he will be able to conduct research into cardiovascular diseases in the coming years.
dr. Sebastian Weingärtner will develop an MRI technique that will allow doctors to better measure how well the hearts of people with heart failure are working. This will enable cardiologists to see the effect of new drugs in the future. They may even be able to detect people at risk of heart failure and prevent them from really getting sick.
Oxygen
About 242,000 people live with heart failure in the Netherlands. Their hearts cannot pump enough blood. In half of these people the heart is not squeezing hard enough and in the other half the heart is too stiff. The heart cannot relax properly and does not fill with blood properly. There is as yet no effective treatment for this last group of people.
An important reason for this is that scientists do not yet know exactly what causes this form of heart failure. They think it’s because the heart muscle isn’t getting enough oxygen. Possibly because the small blood vessels in the heart do not supply enough blood, or because the heart muscle does not use the oxygen properly.
Magnetic field
At this point, doctors are not yet able to properly measure the heart’s oxygen use. MRI Physicist Dr. Sebastian Weingärtner wants to change this in a special way. He will use the effect oxygen has on MRI scans.
“The patient’s body makes the magnetic field in the MRI a bit weaker,” explains Weingärtner. “Oxygen can actually make the magnetic field stronger. Oxygen usually causes annoying disturbances in the image, but in this case it plays to our advantage. Because by looking at these disturbances very precisely, we can measure the amount of oxygen in the heart. In this way we will soon know how much oxygen the small blood vessels supply and how much the heart muscle uses it.”
Not burdensome
If he succeeds in this, doctors will soon be able to measure how the heart muscle is doing without this being a burden for patients. They can also test the effect of new medicines. Doctors may then even be able to identify people at risk of heart failure and prevent them from really getting sick.
More information
Read more about the Dekker grants of the Heart Foundation here.
TU Delft press office: Dimmy van Ruiten,
[email protected], (+31) 15 27 81588