Blood clotting and endurance exercise

Daniel Wundersitz is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with Latrobe University Rural Health School in Bendigo Australia. He has worked at La Trobe and Deakin Universities as an academic and as a biomechanist at the Clinical Gait Analysis Service with Monash Health. He leads the human performance research theme for the Holsworth Research Initiative. His research interests are endurance exercise and the heart, workload monitoring in sports, exercise and blood glucose regulation and workplace occupational demand (to name a few).  He loves AFL (Melbourne Football Club) and prefers dogs to cats as dogs are more active.His twitter handle is @DWundersitz

Dr Daniel Wundersitz has received funding from the Holsworth Research Initiative in the La Trobe Rural Health School to identify changes in blood clotting before, during and after endurance exercise. The project is part of an international research collaboration with 19 researchers from five different institutions. They seek to understand the impact of endurance exercise on the heart.

Heart health and exercise

Dr Wundersitz is working with Professor Lavie from the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute (Ochsner Clinical School-the University of Queensland) and a team from Bendigo Health. They are looking at how endurance exercise causes alterations in the heart’s electrical activity (known as cardiac arrhythmias). Arrhythmias increase the risk of heart attack (and in a small percentage of cases, sudden death) in healthy and active adults.

Call for study participants

The researchers are looking for study participants. Does this sound like you? You need to be a recreationally active adult living in Bendigo. You will be tested over a three-week period before, during and after endurance cycling on an exercise bicycle at the La Trobe Flora Hill campus physiology clinic.

Safeguarding the health of cyclists 

Increasing numbers of people around the world are performing endurance exercise, so this research has real impact. The goals are to:

• provide evidence for the best time to screen recreational and professional athletes for health issues.
• reduce the financial and health burdens for people with exercise-induced heart complaints, and
• promote physical activity guidelines to enable people to safely perform strenuous endurance exercise.

We look forward to providing more updates on this research in the future.