Kara Goss
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Babies born very early now routinely survive into adulthood, but their hearts may carry lasting consequences. People born extremely premature, before 28 weeks of pregnancy, are 17 times more likely to develop heart failure by early adulthood, and neither the reasons nor the pace of decline are well understood.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
preterm birth
prematurity
heart failure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Identify features that impair cardiac growth from childhood into early adulthood after preterm birth, building sex-specific growth curves from repeated MRI measures of left ventricular volume and mass with mixed-effect quantile regression.
- Determine whether fibrosis in both ventricles relates to neonatal characteristics such as resuscitation and progresses with age, using cardiac MRI late gadolinium enhancement and native T1 mapping.
- Assess whether right ventricular–pulmonary vascular coupling declines with age because right ventricular function worsens rather than because afterload rises, using serial MRI stroke volume ratios, strain, and echocardiographic measures of pulmonary vascular disease.
More about the research
Earlier studies of adolescents and adults born preterm identified three features of the preterm heart: a smaller heart that limits how much extra blood can be pumped during exercise; more fibrosis, or scarring, in the left ventricle; and a right ventricle that fails to keep pace with the lung's blood vessels, a mismatch called impaired right ventricular–pulmonary vascular (RV-PV) coupling. How these features change across the early lifespan is unknown.
Why it matters
People born preterm face a sharply elevated risk of early heart failure. Growth and function curves for the preterm heart could help clinicians recognize young people whose hearts are falling behind, and the risk factors and biomarkers identified could justify and target future early-intervention studies aimed at promoting cardiac growth and preserving heart function after preterm birth.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jiwon Kim
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether right ventricle tissue injury, measured with high-resolution 3D LGE MRI (a scan that highlights scar) and extracellular volume mapping, predicts heart remodeling and worsening of the tricuspid leak in at least 265 patients with functional tricuspid regurgitation.
Maria Del Mar Romero Lopez
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether 800 IU/day of vitamin D started within 96 hours of birth, compared with 400 IU/day started after feeding is established, improves lung mechanics measured by oscillometry and reduces wheezing at age two in extremely premature infants from the ViDES trial.
Soban Umar
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how the Snai1–LOXL2–CTGF axis drives endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition, where vessel-lining cells become scar-forming cells, in right ventricles of PH rats and in human coronary artery endothelial cells.
The school
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center: 40 labs on PI Pages, $869M a year on research, 86 research doctorates a year.
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