UAB Center for Exercise Medicine’s trainees including NIH National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research funded T32 trainees won awards at the 16th Annual UAB Postdoctoral Research Day.
Liliana Baptista, PhD – Mentee of Thomas Buford, PhD, Associate Director of UAB Center for Exercise Medicine (UCEM) – was awarded first place in the Applied Research Data Blitz for her research titled “Multimodal intervention to improve functional status in hypertensive older adults: a pilot randomized controlled trial.”
"This pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) was designed to provide the preliminary data necessary to conduct a full-scale trial to compare the efficacy of differing first-line antihypertensive medications in improving functional status in older adults, when combined with exercise," Baptista said.
Jessica Baird, PhD – Mentee of Rob Motl, PhD, Associate Director for Rehabilitation Research at UCEM – was awarded second place in the Applied Research Data Blitz for her research titled "Physical Activity and Walking Performance across the Lifespan in Multiple Sclerosis."
“There is evidence of an association between physical activity (PA) and walking performance in persons with multiple sclerosis (MS),” Baird said. “We are unaware of research that has examined this association in older adults, who represent a fast growing age-group with MS.”
Baird and her team examined this relationship and found that physical activity was significantly associated with walking speed and walking endurance in older adults with MS. From this association, Baird suggests that interventions that aim to increase physical activity may concurrently be approaches for managing walking impairment, particularly in older adults with MS.
Yi Sun, PhD – Mentee of Thomas Buford, PhD and Christy Carter, PhD, Associate Professor in the UAB Department of Medicine – was awarded second place in a Basic Research Data Blitz for her research titled “Ang(1-7) as a novel therapeutic to preserve physical function in late life.”
“Declining physical function and associated diseases in older individuals have enormous emotional, clinical and public health consequences;” Sun said, “therefore, therapeutics for preserving function and keeping older adults living independently are imperative,” she added.
Her study provided proof of concept that delivery of a genetically modified probiotic secreting angiotensin(1-7) to aged rats may promote physical health.
“Our study is highly translatable to humans because using probiotics to deliver health-promoting compounds is low-cost, easy to take and there is a lower burden for regulatory approval,” Sun said.
Kaleen Lavin, PhD – Mentee of Marcas Bamman, PhD, Director of UCEM – was awarded third place in an oral presentation for her research titled “Transcriptional Networks Underlying Motor Unit Remodeling in Parkinson’s Disease Skeletal Muscle.”
Her project was a collaboration with Mt. Sinai School of Medicine to profile transcriptome-wide gene expression in skeletal muscle from individuals with Parkinson’s disease and healthy adults.
“Using Next-Generation Sequencing and a network-based statistical analysis (WGCNA), we identified clusters of genes that characterize type I myofiber grouping, a muscle pathology often seen in Parkinson’s disease,” Lavin said.
Lavin’s ongoing research is aimed at using similar discovery approaches to examine the impact of exercise rehabilitation on gene expression in this population.
UCEM’s T32 Pre-and Post-Doctoral training program provides interdisciplinary training in pathobiology and rehabilitation medicine. Exercise medicine being a major focus of this training program, its overarching goal is to develop burgeoning scientists into future leaders in translational rehabilitation research—scientists who are equipped to test and disseminate novel rehabilitative strategies that alleviate impairment and compromised life quality in the face of chronic disease management.