Bledar Daka, who recently received his PhD at the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine , receives SEK 150 000 in research fellowship from the foundation Women & Health. The money will partially finance Bledar Dakas postdoc in San Diego.
“It is a great honor to receive the scholarship, and it gives me the opportunity to continue my studies of heart attacks, diabetes and vascular disease in women”, says Bledar Daka, who plans to combine this scholarship with contributions he received earlier from the Västra Götaland to finance a postdoctoral position:
“We have contacts with a unit of preventive medicine in San Diego where I plan to conduct a post doc during about a year. There I will get better at using the methodology of studying the connections that interests us”, says Bledar Daka.
The research is conducted on a population level using various population studies and patient registries, and examines the differences between men and women when it comes to cardiovascular disease. One major difference is that women usually suffer later in life than men.
“Women are very protected against cardiovascular disease throughout their lives, right up to menopause, but when women get diabetes, they lose their protection and are as likely to have heart attacks as men. What happens in the blood vessels? How are they protected from the beginning and how she loses it?” Bledar Daka asks himself.
Bledar Dakas thesis, which he presented a year ago, was about how our sex hormones affect the risk to suffer and die of cardiovascular disease, with particular focus on patients with type 2 diabetes.
