A warm welcome to Dr Ana Sayegh. Ana is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Physiology department. She arrived from Brazil at the beginning of November to work with Professor James Fisher. Their project aims to understand a little bit more about the mechanisms involved in hypertension. They are going to evaluate the association between the respiratory and the autonomic control in patients.
During her PhD, she studied the effect of a four month period of exercise training in patients with diastolic heart failure, due to accumulation of a fibrotic tissue in the endocardium. She was able to show the benefits from exercise training improving the quality of life in these patients. She spent one year in Germany working with patients with rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder as part of her PhD. She was able to learn a new technique that leads to a reduction in venous return (called lower body negative pressure) and together with the evaluation of sympathetic activity was able to evaluate specific mechanism that controls blood pressure in these patients.
In the last two years her interest in the respiratory control during exercise grew. She started to investigate the ventilatory responses in patients with pulmonary hypertension who showed increased ventilatory responses during exercise. What was interesting to see was that symptoms of altered ventilatory responses in these patients are present even in lower intensity exercise, which is different from some patients with cardiovascular disease. Additionally in this research line, she has been also learning how to stimulate the central and peripheral receptors (which are responsible for the ventilatory control) in order to manipulate them and test them in different conditions.
She enjoys investigating the role of different mechanism and their influence in the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. She also enjoys understanding how these mechanisms are altered in different diseases and how to manipulate them focusing in the wellbeing of these patients. Here in the University of Auckland she will have plenty of opportunities to continue her research.