WEBINAR SERIES—Metabolic Mechanisms that Contribute to Pregnancy-induced Cardiac Growth and its Reversal

October 16, 2024
11 a.m. EDT

In this webinar, Helen Collins, PhD, will describe the current state of knowledge of the cardiovascular adaptations during a healthy pregnancy and the potential risk factors for developing pregnancy-associated cardiovascular diseases. She will describe work from her laboratory that uses multi-omics approaches to understand the underlying metabolic mechanisms that contribute to pregnancy-induced cardiac growth. Collins will describe the contributions of the ancillary biosynthetic pathways of glucose metabolism, which provide the building blocks to facilitate cardiac growth, and the contributions of myocardial ketone body metabolism in maintaining mitochondrial energetics in the maternal heart.

Key Learning Objectives

• Understand the maternal mortality crisis in the U.S.
• Identify cardiovascular changes and adaptations that occur during normal pregnancy.
• Highlight adverse cardiovascular changes that can occur during pregnancy.
• Discuss potential metabolic mechanisms contributing to pregnancy-induced cardiac growth and how it reverses.

Speaker

Helen Collins, PhD
Assistant Professor, Medicine, University of Louisville

Helen E. Collins, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Medicine in the Center for Cardiometabolic Science at the University of Louisville. She received her BSc (Hons) in biological sciences and her PhD focused on diurnal variation in cardiac excitation-contraction coupling from the University of Leicester in England. She conducted postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of John Chatham, PhD, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where her research focused on elucidating the role of STIM1 in the adult heart. Collins’ laboratory works on understanding the mechanisms contributing to female cardiovascular health and resilience in the setting of physiological and pathological stressors, such as during pregnancy, exercise and myocardial infarction. Her lab also researches the metabolic mechanisms contributing to pregnancy-induced cardiac growth and its reversal. Collins serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology and is an early-career editorial board member for Circulation Research.