Sarah Lessard
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Physiology
How much work your heart, lungs, and muscles can sustain, known as cardiorespiratory fitness, is one of the strongest predictors of who gets sick and who dies early. Aerobic exercise training is the only effective way to raise it.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biology
- Topics
cardiorespiratory fitness
aerobic exercise training
skeletal muscle
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Determine how chronic hyperglycemia alters production of the extracellular matrix, the protein scaffold around muscle fibers, and how that changes the mechanical properties of skeletal muscle.
- Test whether serum from human participants with chronically high blood glucose reproduces impaired aerobic remodeling in tissue culture systems of muscle cells.
- Test whether mechanical signaling through the JNK/SMAD2 pathway is altered with exercise under hyperglycemia, using genetically modified mouse models to manipulate the pathway.
- Evaluate whether targeting JNK/SMAD2 signaling restores the shift toward oxidative fibers and higher capillary density that normally accompanies aerobic training in models of hyperglycemia.
More about the research
The puzzle this work addresses is that people with metabolic diseases such as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes stay less fit than people without those diseases even when they do the same amount of physical activity, as if their bodies cannot fully respond to training. Clinical studies link this persistent low fitness to chronically high blood sugar, or hyperglycemia.
Why it matters
Rising rates of metabolic disease mean more people get less benefit from exercise than they should, even when they put in the effort, and low exercise capacity itself predicts chronic disease and mortality. Identifying why high blood sugar blunts muscle's response to training, and whether the JNK/SMAD2 signaling pathway can be targeted, could lead to treatments that let people with diabetes gain fitness from exercise and improve health span.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sherrie Khadanga
University of Vermont, VT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test in a randomized controlled trial whether high-intensity interval training plus high-intensity resistance training improves peak oxygen uptake (VO2peak) and physical function more than standard moderate cardiac rehabilitation exercise.
Jun Yoshioka
CUNY City College, NY·Physiology
Test whether Arrdc4, an adaptor protein switched on by high glucose, is controlled by the cell's glucose-sensing gene machinery, linking high blood sugar to ER stress in cardiomyocytes.
Christopher Sundberg
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Physiology
Measure how the protein content of slow and fast muscle fibers changes as they shrink with age in older males and females, using single-fiber proteomics and 3D fiber imaging on the same fibers.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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