What will the investment mean for you?
– The support from the SOC means that we can carry out long-term studies on how strenuous exercise affects the heart and thus help make sports safer at both the elite and average levels. We’ll also get closer to the active elite athletes and hear what they’re wondering about and need help with. That’ll give our knowledge a direct channel into sports, which I hope will lead to heart-safe sports with good performances. After Christians Eriksen’s cardiac arrest during the European Football Championship, the issue of heart-safe sports feels particularly relevant.
How does it feel to have this opportunity?
– It’s very inspiring! In the Cardiac MRI group at Clinical Physiology at Lund University and Skåne University Hospital, we have research ideas and ideas about how a heart works and what limits performance. It piques my curiosity to be able to work with the world’s most elite athletes as they really push their abilities to the max and study what determines their limits. I also look forward to the interdisciplinary collaboration with the other researchers; I think we’ll learn a lot from that.
Do you currently have an assignment from the SOC?
– The SOC began to support our sports research back in 2020, with a research grant for projects where we use a bicycle inside a magnetic camera to study how the heart beats during physical exertion. It’s a method that I developed together with Professor Bengt Saltin during my postdoc here in Lund and which has now spread around the world.
You’re researching the significance of exercise for our heart. In specific terms, what are you interested in finding out through your research?
– We know that a healthy, fit heart is bigger than an unfit one, but the fact that it’s bigger can’t fully explain how it can pump so much more blood than an unfit heart. We’re trying to understand more about how the function is affected with the help of new advanced magnetic camera methods, like a bicycle inside the magnetic camera. For elite athletes, this is interesting because they want to know how to train to get the best possible heart function. But we also work with seriously ill heart failure patients who need to exercise, in order to see if their heart function can be affected and if so, in what way.
While we still have you on the line: Do you have any tips/advice for what we can do in our everyday lives this autumn to make our hearts a little happier?
– Everyone knows that you should stay active and eat fruit and vegetables. But did you know that brushing your teeth is important for the heart? Tooth loss and bleeding gums give bacteria an opportunity to enter the bloodstream and cause inflammation that increases the risk of heart disease. So maybe my tip is to floss and brush your teeth. If you also stand on one leg while using an electric toothbrush, you can squeeze in some extra balance training for your vestibular system.
