Jeanie Park
Emory University, GA·Physiology
People with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are far more likely to die of heart problems than of kidney failure itself. A major reason is that the sympathetic nervous system, the body's "fight or flight" branch that raises heart rate and tightens blood vessels, is stuck in overdrive.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
chronic kidney disease
sympathetic nervous system
muscle sympathetic nerve activity
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction produces sustained reductions in muscle sympathetic nerve activity, recorded by microneurography, that are linked to lower daytime blood pressure and restored nighttime blood pressure dipping in patients with chronic kidney disease.
- Determine whether transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation, a noninvasive self-administered therapy, augments the sympathetic-lowering effect of mindfulness training and improves arterial baroreflex sensitivity and inflammatory markers in CKD.
- Test the hypothesis that acid buildup in the fluid around exercising muscle, resulting from reduced bicarbonate buffering capacity, drives the exaggerated exercise pressor reflex in CKD, using nerve recordings, hemodynamics, biomarkers and imaging during exercise.
- Determine whether acutely restoring bicarbonate availability lessens exercise-induced hypertension, and whether oral bicarbonate supplementation enhances the benefits of aerobic exercise training in CKD patients without overt resting acidosis.
More about the research
This overactivity makes blood pressure hard to control, keeps it from dipping normally at night, and produces exaggerated blood pressure spikes during physical activity. Existing drugs that quiet this system are often poorly tolerated. Both projects here measure sympathetic nerve traffic directly in human volunteers and test practical, low-cost ways to turn it down, one using behavioral and nerve-stimulation approaches at rest and one targeting the reflex that drives blood pressure up during exercise.
Why it matters
Chronic kidney disease affects roughly 15% of US adults and sharply raises cardiovascular death risk, yet drugs that suppress sympathetic overactivity are often intolerable. These studies test inexpensive, well-tolerated options, mindfulness training, ear-level vagus nerve stimulation and oral bicarbonate, and could identify physiological pathways by which they improve blood pressure, exercise tolerance and long-term heart risk in CKD. Findings may also inform clinical guidance on bicarbonate targets and rehabilitation strategies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Qandeel Soomro
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Deeply profile autonomic nervous system dysfunction across stages of chronic kidney disease using a comprehensive battery of autonomic tests, both cross-sectionally and over time, to test whether dysfunction shifts from parasympathetic to sympathetic as CKD advances.
Roderick Tan
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Measure how the activity of renal nerves changes across different forms of chronic kidney disease, using several mouse models of CKD.
Anthony Muiru
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Determine the clinical significance of unexplained leukocyturia (white blood cells in urine) and hematuria (blood in urine) among adults in rural East Africa, by following SEARCH-CKD participants over time and measuring markers in collected samples.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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