Dr. Farhan Raza leads multi-modal study targeting debilitating and rising form of heart failure
A new study in Circulation: Heart Failure led by Farhan Raza, MD, associate professor, Cardiovascular Medicine, marks progress in understanding and detecting the severity of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).
Approximately 3 million people in the United States live with HFpEF, and that number is growing.
“A big challenge is that we don’t know why some people develop HFpEF who have the same medical problems of obesity, hypertension and diabetes, and why some people don’t,” says Dr. Raza (pictured).
Timely detection of the disease is also a challenge.
Dr. Raza—who is also a member of the University of Wisconsin (UW) Cardiovascular Research Center in the Department of Medicine—and a team of researchers from the UW–Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research, used advanced imaging, invasive cardiac testing, and molecular analysis to better understand why some patients with HFpEF develop right ventricular dysfunction, a complication linked to worse outcomes.
They found that right ventricular function may be a stronger predictor of prognosis than current approaches used to classify disease severity. The research also uncovered biological changes tied to impaired energy metabolism and mitochondrial function, offering new clues about the mechanisms driving disease progression.
Dr. Raza believes these findings could help move the field toward precision medicine, allowing clinicians to identify the specific mechanisms affecting individual patients and ultimately match them with more targeted therapies.
Read the full story from the Morgridge Institute for Research.