Research summary
Cardiovascular epidemiology in older adults and pharmacoepidemiology together define this work. The Cardiovascular Health Study cohort of 5,201 community-dwelling adults aged 65 and older was followed annually with standardized clinical and echocardiographic assessments to measure the incidence of atrial fibrillation; over three years of follow-up the study documented age- and sex-stratified incidence rates that rose steeply with age and identified hypertension, prevalent valvular heart disease, left-atrial enlargement on echocardiography, and prior congestive heart failure as independent predictors, providing one of the foundational population-based estimates of AF incidence in the elderly that is still cited in current arrhythmia guidelines [2]. A separate analysis within the same population linked elevated C-reactive protein to incident AF independent of conventional cardiovascular risk factors, supporting an inflammatory mechanism in the genesis of the arrhythmia and motivating subsequent biomarker and anti-inflammatory-therapy work in atrial-fibrillation prevention [3]. A pharmacoepidemiology analysis of nifedipine across randomized secondary-prevention trials examined the dose–mortality relationship and identified an increasing mortality signal at higher doses; the paper discussed mechanisms including reflex sympathetic activation, beat-to-beat blood-pressure variability, and pro-ischemic effects by which short-acting dihydropyridines might increase cardiovascular events, and the analysis contributed to the practice shift away from short-acting calcium-channel-blocker formulations in patients with coronary disease [4]. In genomics, a trans-eQTL meta-analysis across 5,311 peripheral-blood samples with replication in 2,775 additional individuals identified distal regulatory effects of disease-associated SNPs and built a framework for linking GWAS hits to downstream gene-expression consequences, with applications to autoimmune and cardiometabolic disease loci and to identifying putative causal mediators of established disease associations [1]. Across these papers the methodological emphasis is on large prospective cohorts and pooled analyses with explicit attention to confounding, dose–response, and the translation of population-level associations into etiologic and therapeutic inference.
Recent publications
- Biological, clinical and population relevance of 95 loci for blood lipidsDOI
- The cardiovascular health study: Design and rationaleDOI
- Large-scale cis- and trans-eQTL analyses identify thousands of genetic loci and polygenic scores that regulate blood gene expressionDOI
- Genetic variants in novel pathways influence blood pressure and cardiovascular disease riskDOI
- Systematic identification of trans eQTLs as putative drivers of known disease associationsDOI
- Common genetic determinants of vitamin D insufficiency: a genome-wide association studyDOI
- Incidence of and Risk Factors for Atrial Fibrillation in Older AdultsDOI
- Inflammation as a Risk Factor for Atrial FibrillationDOI
- Genome-wide association study of blood pressure and hypertensionDOI
- NifedipineDOI
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External profiles
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7278-2190
- OpenAlex: openalex.org
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