Dr. Andrei Krassioukov, Professor in the Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and researcher at ICORD, is heading a team that has been awarded a CIHR Team Grant to study cardiovascular health in patients with spinal cord injuries.
The team Dr. Krassioukov has created will study the impact of exercise and targeted education on cardiovascular health of people with chronic spinal cord injuries. This population exhibit cardiovascular risks younger and more frequently than the general population, and exercise has been proposed as a way to reduce this risk. It is not yet known, however, how exercise programs should be modified for people with spinal cord injuries, or whether these requirements differ between men and women. This multi-centre study will attempt to determine the effects of exercise on cardiovascular risk factors, while ensuring that the exercise programs that are created meet this population’s unique needs.
CIHR Team Grants are extremely competitive research funding programs that aim to support multidisciplinary teams who wish to integrate projects from different fields and generate a cohesive and well-developed research project. These grants require that teams be made up of researchers from at minimum three universities and represent at least two of CIHR’s four research pillars; Biomedical, Clinical, Population and Public Health, and Health Systems and Services.