Ramon Margalef Prize: A groundbreaking research on cardiovascular health

Begoña Benito.
Begoña Benito.
Research
(22/01/2018)

This yearʼs Ramon Margalef Prize of the Board of Trustees to the best article published in a distinguished journal in the field of experimental and health sciences from a doctoral thesis, which honours the researcher Begoña Benito, has been awarded to a breaking research. In particular, this is a research opposing the previous concept on physical activity at any level being healthy. This study was published in a high-impact journal on cardiology, Circulation, and it shows how continuous endurance sport for years could cause alterations in the cardiac structure and function and create a substrate for arrhythmia.

Begoña Benito.
Begoña Benito.
Research
22/01/2018

This yearʼs Ramon Margalef Prize of the Board of Trustees to the best article published in a distinguished journal in the field of experimental and health sciences from a doctoral thesis, which honours the researcher Begoña Benito, has been awarded to a breaking research. In particular, this is a research opposing the previous concept on physical activity at any level being healthy. This study was published in a high-impact journal on cardiology, Circulation, and it shows how continuous endurance sport for years could cause alterations in the cardiac structure and function and create a substrate for arrhythmia.

The objective of this study, which lasted five years, was to determine the long-term cardiac effects in an animal model, something which had not been studied so far at high levels of chronicity. Therefore, the team from the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona put a group of rats under a daily hour of intense exercise during four, eight and sixteen weeks -the latter representing an important model of chronicity that could be equal to a daily training during ten years in humans, and compared it to another group of sedimentary rats (control group). During this time, and only in those rats under sixteen weeks of training, researchers saw irregularities in the structure of the cardiac muscle (fibrosis) in rats under intense exercise, especially in the atrium and the right ventricle. This suggests there is a direct relation between the endurance effort which has occurred continuously with the probabilities of developing cardiac alterations that can favour a cardiac arrhythmia. This correlates with the clinical observations of a higher probability of suffering from atrial fibrillation in the long run in endurance training athletes. Also, cardiac fibrosis located in the ventricle, could be similar to that seen in some cases of ventricular arrhythmia in athletes. Moreover, the study shows that stopping the training after two, four and eight weeks results in an important remission of the cardiac anomaly, especially in the right ventricle.     

The article, “Cardiac arrhythmogenic remodeling in a rat model of long-term intensive exercise training”, was selected by the editors in Circulation as one of the top published articles and has become a model out of which many publications came up. Benitoʼs doctoral thesis continued with the publication of a second article using the same model, which proved that the appearance of fibrosis in atriums as a response to the intense exercise, together with an increase of a vagal discharge, account for the higher susceptibility to show atrial fibrillation in sporty rats.
This research study should be framed within the general principle that regular exercise prevents cardiovascular diseases and improves the health of those who suffer them. It is important to remind that a physically active lifestyle is linked to a decrease of death rate due cardiac diseases by at least 30 %, so that the more exercise we do, the fewer events of cardiovascular problems can come up. As it was previously mentioned, the discovery in the awarded research refers only to very intense exercise and a high level of chronicity.
The awarded study is part of the doctoral thesis conducted by Dr Benito, supervised by Lluís Mont and Josep Brugada, and is signed by a multidisciplinary team and members of the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS), the Department of Arrhythmias in Hospital Clínic de Barcelona - University of Barcelona, and the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona (IIBB-CSIC), in collaboration with the Montreal Heart Institute and the University of Montreal, in Quebec (Canada). At the moment, Begoña Benito is carrying her task out as a researcher in the Group of Biomedical Research on Heart Disease (GREC), in Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute.