If Rebecca Tomasi decides to pursue a career in research, this past summer’s hands-on experience will undoubtedly have had an impact.
Tomasi, a fourth-year kinesiology major with the Faculty, was one of five students selected for a summer program that offers upperyear students the chance to work in a laboratory while whetting their appetites for research.
“I want to work in health care someday, but I’m not 100 per cent sure research is what I want,” says Tomasi, 21. “A master’s degree in exercise science is something I’m thinking about, but I’m also thinking about physiology or sports medicine.”
Tomasi spent her summer in the Dr. Terry Kavanagh Heart Health Lab, working with Professor Jack Goodman on a large, long-term study of the cardiac consequences of endurance exercise, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The study has 150 subjects and has been underway for more than a year.
“We are looking at factors that may predispose long-term endurance athletes to arrhythmias [irregular heartbeats],” Goodman says. “Research has found that people who have run marathons for 10 to 30 years have a five-to-eight times greater chance of atrial fibrillation.”
Atrial fibrillation is defined as “an irregular and often rapid heart rate that may cause poor blood flow to the body.” Goodman’s study is examining blood pressure data and other cardiac measures taken from long-term endurance athletes with data gathered from recreational athletes.
Tomasi was involved in two aspects of the study: a lab-based cardio-pulmonary exercise test that measures maximum oxygen consumption, electrocardiograms and blood pressure, in addition to echocardiograms (administered at Mt. Sinai Hospital) that assess heart function and structure.
“Working with the subjects was a really good experience. I learned how to speak to them so that they were comfortable about the research and informed,” Tomasi said. “I also really enjoyed the cardio-pulmonary exercise test. It went from being something I was unsure I was able to do to running the protocol. That was really rewarding.”
It was Tomasi’s first hands-on research experience and the project offered an additional bonus: the opportunity to be a co-author on a research abstract that will be presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Society and published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology in the fall.
“It was exciting to be part of collecting, inputting and processing the data and now, to be part of the final product,” Tomasi said. “As a result of this experience I will challenge myself to be more analytical.”