Dr Sarah Birkhoelzer receives award for heart metabolism research
The British Society for Heart Failure has awarded this year’s Early Investigator Award to Christ Church DPhil candidate in Medical Science Dr Sarah Birkhoelzer. Dr Birkhoelzer, who is also a Cardiology Registrar and Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, has been recognised for her exceptional and innovative research into the crucial, often overlooked role of muscle in cardiovascular health.
Through the Early Investigator Award, the British Society for Heart Failure (BSH) seeks to celebrate and promote new approaches and groundbreaking research into heart failure management conducted by emerging scientists and clinicians. By highlighting young talent, the award helps ensure a continued influx of fresh ideas and perspectives in the field, fostering the development of improved diagnostic tools, more effective therapies and treatments, and enhanced personalised patient care, leading to better patient outcomes. The award also serves to build public understanding of heart failure, and thus serves to promote public health initiatives, funding, and policy changes to support cardiovascular health research and care globally.
BSH this year awarded its Early Investigator Award to Oxford University Clinical Research Fellow and Christ Church DPhil candidate Dr Sarah Birkhoelzer. Dr Birkhoelzer’s celebrated study explores, through advanced imaging techniques, how iron deficiency in patients with heart failure affects their heart and muscle function, quality of life and exercise capacity.
‘I wanted to see whether providing patients with iron could improve both their heart and muscle health,’ Dr Birkhoelzer explains. ‘Iron deficiency in heart failure is linked to poorer outcomes, and adding iron can help improve exercise ability and symptoms. However, it’s been unclear if these benefits arise because of improvements in the heart, muscles, or both.’
In Dr Birkhoelzer’s study, 17 patients with heart failure and low iron levels were assessed. MRI was used to look at the heart’s structure and function and specialised tests to see how muscles use energy, both before and after iron treatment.
Receiving the British Society for Heart Failure Early Investigator Award is both humbling and empowering.
Receiving the British Society for Heart Failure Early Investigator Award is both humbling and empowering.
The results of the study are encouraging: after receiving iron, there was a marked improvement in patients’ heart and skeletal muscle function and exercise capacity. The research shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked way in which skeletal muscle function affects the day-to-day symptom burden experienced by patients with heart failure.
Dr Birkhoelzer was delighted to have her innovative research commended by BSH: 'Receiving the British Society for Heart Failure Early Investigator Award is both humbling and empowering. This recognition highlights that iron is intrinsically involved in improvement in cardiac and skeletal muscle function, paving the way for advancements and more precise phenotyping of patients living with heart failure to enable individualised treatment.'
Focusing on muscle as the “forgotten organ” in cardiovascular studies, Dr Sarah Birkhoelzer employs advanced spectroscopy to highlight metabolic pathways that could lead to new treatments in cardiovascular disease and understand muscle performance in athletes. Learn more about her research via her University of Oxford Radcliffe Department of Medicine profile.
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