“Preventing Preeclampsia: The Impact of Physical Training with Julie Lavoie”

During the Interaxes conference of the CRCHUM of 5 Maywe will receive Julie Lavoieresearcher in the Cardiometabolic axis, and director and full professor at the School of Kinesiology and Sciences of Physical Activity, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montreal.

Preeclampsia is a gestational condition for which the only treatment is premature delivery. Julie Lavoie’s laboratory projects demonstrate that physical training can prevent or reduce the severity of this condition in mouse models or in women. She will present these data as well as the potential mechanisms that her lab has identified. Given the significant effect of physical activity on the prevention of preeclampsia and several gestational cardiometabolic disorders, his team initiated a study evaluating the practice of doctors and nurses with regard to the discussions they have with women pregnant in the practice of physical activity. Julie Lavoie will therefore present this preliminary data collected at the CRCHUM.

Julie Lavoie, Ph.D., is director of the School of Kinesiology and Sciences of Physical Activity at the University of Montreal and a researcher at the CHUM Research Center in the Cardiometabolic axis. Julie Lavoie has two main areas of research in her laboratory:

1. understand the mechanisms by which exercise training can prevent preeclampsia and improve reproduction and
2. study the involvement of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) in adipose tissue on obesity and on diseases associated with obesity such as hypertension, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

To address these themes, she uses animal models of pre-eclampsia and novel hypertensive transgenic mouse models for the renin-angiotensin system, as well as her CFI-funded platform to “Assess the Cardiometabolic Impact of Training at ‘exercise on maternal and offspring outcomes in models of preeclampsia’. His work is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Since 2015, she has been an active member of the Scientific Committee of the Canadian Congress on Hypertension. In addition, she is actively involved in various scientific and academic committees within her institutions and for funding agencies.

The Interaxes conferences aim to make the achievements of our researchers better known, and to encourage collaboration between the teams of the different research axes of the Research Center.

They are intended for the entire scientific community of the CRCHUM and are offered two to three times a month.