As a clinician scientist and nurse practitioner, Edith Pituskin runs a busy clinic, caring for cancer patients while learning how to relieve the symptoms people face that can lead to poor quality of life after treatment.
"People are commonly suffering with the effects of necessary anti-cancer treatments for the remainder of their life," says Pituskin, associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Nursing. "These effects can include difficult chronic fatigue and poor exercise tolerance leading to a cycle of depression and poor quality of life."
To better understand how such effects happen and how to help people cope, a new U of A Precision Human Health Laboratory will help researchers investigate techniques to improve patients' exercise tolerance and cardiovascular health, and expand the use of exercise as a clinical tool.
Pituskin and co-principal investigators Stephanie Thompson, associate professor in the Division of Nephrology, and Michael Stickland, professor in the Division of Pulmonary Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, have just received $507,115 in infrastructure funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation's John R. Evans Leaders Fund to equip the lab.
The new funding is part of more than $960 million in federal funding announced at the U of A today, supporting innovative work by more than 4,700 researchers across Canada.
Exercise underused as a clinical tool
The laboratory will house tools that allow scientists to look at the mechanisms of exercise tolerance as well as study cardiovascular function — conditions that feed off each other, notes Stickland, who studies the effects of smoking-induced lung damage on the heart.
"This is a combination of a vision to really expand exercise as a clinical tool," says Stickland, who is also a member of the Women and Children's Health Research Institute.
"What makes this lab truly unique is that because of the clinical positions the three of us have, there are tremendous opportunities to bring this research to patients."
Thompson, whose research explores chronic kidney disease, explains that in addition to its therapeutic potential, exercise can be used to safely stress a patient's bodily systems to better understand the physiological problems that underlie clinical issues she sees in her practice.
"I believe there is no other intervention that can have as many widespread physiological and psychological impacts as exercise," says Thompson.
