Professor Michael Stowasser
Name: Michael Stowasser
Research Group/Institute: Endocrine Hypertension Research Centre, University of Queensland School of Medicine
Research Interest/Field:
Seeking causes of hypertension (high blood pressure), including genes that lead to hypertensive conditions, and developing the best ways of diagnosing forms that can be cured or specifically treated.
What made you decide to work in this field? Hypertension is very common, affecting around 30% of Australian adults, and is a leading rick factor for stroke, heart disease and kidney disease. Treatment usually means lifelong medications which can be identified, and can be reversed or specifically treated, the outcomes are often dramatic with patients being able to come off many or all of their medications, and enjoying marked improvements in quality of life.
It's a great feeling to be able to offer this alternative to patients who are otherwise struggling with poorly controlled hypertension and medication-related side effects, and who feel so much better if a treatable cause can be found and properly managed.
What is the goal and significance of your research that you would like people to know? Currently, the most common curable or specifically treatable form of hypertension is a condition called primary aldosteronism (PA), in which the adrenal glands produce too much of a salt-retaining hormone know as aldosteronism. Our centre has the largest cohort of patients diagnosed with PA in Australia, and possible the world, with over 1500 patients treated either by removal or an adrenal gland or with effective, aldosterone-blocking medications, leading to either cure or improvement in hypertension control and in quality of life.
A major barrier to the diagnosis of PA is the need for a complicated test that requires patients to be admitted to hospital for five days during which multiple blood samples are collected. We hope to develope a better, faster and more cost-effective way of diagnosing PA which will only require a brief outpatient visit. This will be much more convenient for the patient, cheaper for the medical system, and easier to perform, meaning that more hospitals around the country will be able to offer confirmatory testing for PA.
If your were at a dinner party and someone asked you what you are researching, what would you say? As above.
How does of how has or how will funding from a Foundation help your research project? We can now employ a research person to help recruit study volunteers, arrange the various forms of testing to be compared, collect patient information and samples, arrange measurement of aldosterone and other analytes, and help with data analysis.
What is on your research wish list? I really need a senior scientist who is experienced enough to drive the laboratory to even greater things.
What do you like to do when you're not at work? Spend time with my wife, entertain family and friends (we love to cook), play the piano (jazz mostly), walk our two dogs, read, listen to music, try to resist the urge to do sudokus.
What would you be doing if you weren't a researcher? I love being a doctor, treating patients with high blood pressure. Other than medicine, I would certainly go back to being a musician, playing keyboards for jazz and rock bands and recording music.
What are you most proud of? B
eing a part of a successful Centre at the time that it first demonstrated PA to be 10 times more common than previously thought, and thereby giving thousands more people with hypertension the chance for a cure or better control through specific treatment, with markedly improved quality of life.
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