Mats Lassen
He aims to detect heart disease in time
Mats Lassen, doctor and PhD student, is receiving a Lundbeck Foundation 2022 Talent Prize for his research on factors implicated in cardiac contraction patterns and functioning.
How do different diseases and medicines affect the functioning of the human heart?
And can new scientific discoveries in these areas be applied in developing new forms of disease prevention?
These are some of the main topics of Mats Lassen’s research.
Lassen is a medical doctor and PhD student at the Department of Cardiology at Herlev-Gentofte Hospital, and one of the five young scientists awarded a Lundbeck Foundation 2022 Talent Prize.
Lassen has been researching this field for a number of years using cardiac ultrasound scans to investigate how diseases and medicines alike affect the contraction patterns and function of the heart.
This is not the first time Lassen’s achievements are recognised by Lundbeck Foundation: in 2017, he received one of the Foundation’s DARE fellowships.
These fellowships are awarded annually to five particularly talented medical students at Danish universities, and allow the recipients to spend the last year of their medical degree at a top American university.
‘I studied at University of California i San Francisco (CSF), where I was investigating changes in cardiac contraction patterns under the effects of various diseases,’ Lassen explains:
‘In my PhD, which I’m writing at the Department of Cardiology at Herlev-Gentofte Hospital, I’m specifically investigating how these contraction changes are affected by diabetes.’
Patients with type 2 diabetes are documented as having a higher risk of heart disease and heart failure than the general population. However, the exact cause of this increased risk has not yet been fully determined. And this is one of the areas Lassen is seeking to gain new knowledge about by means of various types of advanced cardiac ultrasound scans.
‘The aim is to be able to detect early cardiac dysfunction occurring under the effects of type 2 diabetes so that we can apply that knowledge in delivering the best possible preventive care as early as possible,’ Lassen explains:
‘At present, patients with type 2 diabetes are not routinely offered cardiac ultrasound scans. I hope that the results of my PhD project will help to ensure that cardiac ultrasound scans become a more focal part of the care plans offered to patients with type 2 diabetes.’
With the aid of advanced scanning techniques, Lassen is also researching how different medicinal therapies can affect cardiac contraction patterns, and thereby actually cause heart problems, and he adds that ‘This applies, for example, to various drugs to treat breast cancer. And we’re able to see these changes with the aid of scans, which means we can offer the best possible preventive care.’
Covid-19 can also affect cardiac functioning, Lassen explains:
‘During the initial Covid-19 lockdown, I had planned to investigate cardiac dysfunction in a number of patients with type 2 diabetes, but, for obvious reasons, this couldn’t go ahead. Instead, a colleague and I had the idea of investigating whether the heart might be affected in Covid-19 patients hospitalised for treatment. In these patients, ultrasound scans soon revealed that the acute phase of the virus that causes Covid-19 definitely affects the heart. At the same time, we observed that the more severe the Covid-19 case, the greater the negative effect on cardiac functioning.’
‘Fortunately, the negative effect on the hearts of most Covid-19 patients had resolved once they had recovered from the virus. We were able to observe this when we scanned them again, three months after they came out of hospital.’
From the autumn of 2023 and twelve months on, Lassen will be a visiting researcher at Harvard Medical School, one of the foremost medical faculties in the US: ‘This is one of the research activities I’ll be investing the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize in,’ he says.
Mats Lassen about his research and the Talent Prize 2022:
