Research & Initiatives
Cardiac Rehabilitation and Secondary Prevention: Quality, Outcomes, and Systems of Care
In collaboration with clinical partners, projects that evaluate the quality and outcomes of care for patients participating in cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention programs, as well as the characteristics of the program, health care delivery system, and patients that are associated with different outcomes or quality of care.
Cardiovascular Disease in Patients with Neuroendocrine Tumours
Neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) are a heterogeneous and complex group of neoplasms in neuroendocrine cells that can be found throughout the body. Once considered rare, NETs are now recognized as the fastest growing cancers. Some patients with gastrointestinal NETs develop a particular form of cardiovascular disease, known as carcinoid heart disease, characterized by the development of fibrous plaque-like deposits and endocardial thickening involving heart valves. Unfortunately, carcinoid heart disease is associated with very poor quality of life and worse prognosis, yet little is understood about the underlying pathophysiology or how to improve early diagnosis and interdisciplinary management. The goal of this translational research project, which includes both clinical and basic science collaborators, is to develop a detailed understanding of mechanisms underlying carcinoid heart disease using both molecular biology and vascular imaging approaches.
Cardiovascular Health of Canadians
Health is not merely the absence of disease and improving population health will be unsuccessful of the leading strategy is the reliance on medical and / or pharmacologic management of already established disease or disease risk factors. That is, a critical step in improving population health is defining and then measuring and quantifying health, and the factors associated with better – or worse – health. Activities associated with this project include assessing the prevalence, distribution and factors associated with cardiovascular health in Canadians, including the development of the Canadian Cardiovascular Health Index (CCVHI), an adaptation of the Cardiovascular Health Index originally developed by the American Heart Association.
Dementia Prevention Initiative
This is a large and visionary project, funded by the Weston Brain Institute, with the long term goal to prevent the development of dementia and, therefore, costs and burdens of dementia borne by patients, their caregivers and families, and, more broadly, society. More specifically, the Dementia Prevention Initiative aims to integrate population, environmental, sociodemographic and patient data with a diverse array of analytic approaches to develop and implement comprehensive, evidence-based and population level approaches to dementia prevention. Currently, the focus of activities associated with this project is the development of unique Canada geo- and tempero-spatial analyses of cognitive impairment, dementia and related conditions, including stroke and cardiovascular disease.
Social and Environmental Determinants of Health
It is now well understood that health – good or bad – does not “just happen”. Rather, health, be it for individuals or entire communities or populations, occurs within a context that is the result of a complex set of factors, including genetic and biologic factors, behaviors, factors and resources in the social environment, economic factors, the built and physical environments, the health care system, and even the political and economic system. These factors, and their complex relationships and interactions, are characterized in a variety of different social-ecologic models of health. The importance of these social, economic, and environmental contextual factors informs most all work done in the THOR Lab, and most all projects incorporate specific analyses approaches informed by social-ecologic models and / or standardized analytic approaches for evaluating the social and environmental determinants of health.
Translational Vascular Function
In collaboration with basic science partners, activities with this project apply complex, multi-step statistical modeling to better understand the determinants of cardiovascular and vascular function in basic science research models.