My laboratory has been generally interested in neural control of cardiopulmonary function at rest and during exercise in diseases. Our particular interests have been primarily, but not limited to, the role of skeletal muscle afferents, cardiac spinal afferents and pulmonary spinal afferents using a variety of species and models. Much of my earlier laboratory work concentrated on the role of skeletal muscle afferents dysfunction in mediating exercise intolerance in the chronic heart failure (CHF) state. Recently, we have concentrated on the role of the cardiopulmonary spinal afferents in mediating cardiac structural and functional remodeling (a cardiac-cardiac positive feedback loop) following myocardial infarction (MI).. More recently, we also identified a novel neural mechanism underlying the pathological crosstalk between heart and lung in cardiopulmonary diseases.
