William Todd Cade

Exercise and Cardiometabolic Health

Precision Rehabilitation and Innovation in CardioMetabolic HEalth (PRIME) Laboratory

Exercise and Cardiometabolic Health

The overall goal of our laboratory is to study innovative and precision rehabilitation strategies to enhance cardiometabolic health. Through our studies, we aim to determine how exercise mode, frequency, intensity and concomitant therapies (nutritional/pharmacologic/gene therapy) modulate physiologic and molecular mediators of cardiometabolic function, primarily focusing on substrate (e.g. amino acid, glucose, fatty acid) metabolism, energetic, and functional abnormalities in skeletal muscle and heart. We study metabolic diseases including Barth syndrome and other pediatric and adult cardiomyopathies, HIV-related metabolic syndrome, diabetes mellitus, and obesity. We are also interested in the effect of precision exercise during pregnancy on maternal and offspring health in women with obesity and diabetes. Our lab employs methodology used to measure whole-body substrate metabolism by stable isotope tracers and mass spectrometry, molecular mediators by metabolomics and extracelluar vesicle analyses, heart and skeletal muscle energetics by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), exercise tolerance assessment by graded exercise testing and indirect calorimetry, cardiac function by echocardiography, vascular function by peripheral arterial tonometry and vascular ultrasound, body composition analysis by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) and air displacement plethymosgraphy, muscle strength by isokinetic dynamometry, and daily physical activity by actigraphy.