Cum Laude PhD degree for Vincent Aengevaeren

We congratulate Vincent Aengevaeren! After defending his thesis entitled: ‘Potential Detrimental Effects of Exercise on the Heart’ on 28 October, Vincent attained his PhD degree with honors. Vincent had been appointed on a RIHS Junior Researcher grant.

Outline of this thesis
Sport is healthy for the body and in the current exercise advice more exercise is better. However, there is also discussion whether you can exercise too much. Research in this dissertation showed that the most active middle-aged men more often have coronary artery calcification, but a less harmful variant. Also, scar tissue in the heart is relatively common in athletes, but is often localized in specific places, which are probably less harmful. What the consequences of these changes are is still unknown and follow-up research is needed. Furthermore, increases in signalling substances of cardiac muscle damage due to exertion were found to be predictive for early death and future cardiovascular diseases. It is possible that in the future we will be able to detect vulnerable individuals and treat them in time. Sport can harm the heart of certain vulnerable individuals, but the benefits of sport are many times greater than the disadvantages for most people.

Click here to access Vincent's thesis digitally.

Biography
Vincent Aengevaeren (1991) graduated cum laude from Radboud University in 2015. He carried out the above research in the service of the Department of Physiology of the Radboudumc, within the Radboud Institute for Health Sciences. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physiology. In 2021 he starts his training as a cardiologist at the Radboudumc.