Thomas Everett
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Medicine & Clinical Research
The nervous system that drives the body's "fight or flight" response, the sympathetic nervous system, helps control the heartbeat. Surges in its activity can set off dangerous heart rhythms.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
skin sympathetic nerve activity
sympathetic nervous system
autonomic nervous system
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Test whether skin sympathetic nerve activity (SKNA), nerve signals recorded noninvasively from the skin, predicts brain recovery in cardiac arrest patients receiving targeted temperature management, a protective cooling therapy.
- Determine whether very low SKNA or an altered link between SKNA and heart rate during cooling therapy signals breakdown of the body's automatic nervous control after cardiac arrest.
- Use SKNA recordings to sort patients by their risk of atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, returning after catheter ablation, by analyzing the nerve activity that can trigger it.
- Evaluate SKNA as a biomarker and possible surrogate end point for future clinical studies of common heart diseases.
More about the research
Measuring this nerve activity usually requires invasive recordings. A simple skin measurement could help doctors predict how heart patients will fare.
Why it matters
Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strikes more than 350,000 people each year, and brain injury drives much of the death and disability afterward. Early, accurate prediction of brain recovery during cooling therapy remains a challenge. AF often returns after ablation. A noninvasive skin recording could help doctors judge prognosis after cardiac arrest and identify AF patients at high risk of recurrence. It may also offer a measurable end point for future heart studies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Pfenniger
Northwestern University, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Map when and where endothelial dysfunction appears during atrial fibrillation, especially the shift from paroxysmal to persistent AF, in two large animal models of AF.
Aravindan Kolandaivelu
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether native-contrast T1-weighted MRI, an imaging method that shows permanent ablation scars without injected dye, can detect sites of incomplete atrial fibrillation ablation.
Peter Hanna
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Identify which ganglionated plexus neurons supply the pulmonary veins and back wall of the left atrium by injecting a retrograde neural tracer into donated human hearts and imaging them with confocal microscopy.
The school
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis: 25 labs on PI Pages, $89M a year on research, 120 research doctorates a year.
More about Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis
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