Dekker grants are personal grants from the Heart Foundation for young, talented researchers
Researchers from Maastricht UMC+ Uyen Chau Nguyen and Martijn Hoes have received a Dekker grant from the Heart Foundation for their research in the field of cardiovascular disease. Nguyen receives €245,000 for research into arrhythmias in heart failure, Hoes receives €270,000 for research into heart failure due to pregnancy.
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 is a cardiologist in training and researcher. She studies patients with heart failure due to impaired electrical conduction pathways: ‘In a healthy person, these pathways control 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.”
Prevent
In the Netherlands, more than 2100 people receive this type of pacemaker every year. ”It is therefore important that we find out how some of them develop this arrhythmia,” Nguyen is not only a doctor, but also a clinical technologist. ”Thanks to my background, we can use complex techniques in this research, such as ECG imaging, which was developed by doctors and engineers in Maastricht. This is an extended variant of the classic heart film, because the heart is visualized in more detail on the basis of more electrodes. In this way, we hope to identify differences between the group with and without the cardiac arrhythmia, with the ultimate goal of preventing its occurrence.”
Heart failure during pregnancy
An estimated 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. This phenomenon is the subject of research by biomedical scientist Martijn Hoes: ”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 proportion, about 6%, even die. At the moment it is still a mystery how this heart failure arises, while we do know that it has a huge impact on mother, child and family.”
Laboratory
With the Dekker grant, Hoes can unravel heart failure in pregnant women: ”We conduct our research entirely in the laboratory. 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.”
Personnel
drs. Uyen Nguyen is training to be a cardiologist at the Heart + Vascular Center of Maastricht UMC +. Biomedical scientist Dr. Martijn Hoes obtained his PhD at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and is currently a researcher at the CARIM research institute of Maastricht UMC+.
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