Research Areas

The adverse outcomes are increasingly linked to heightened future cardiovascular (CV) risk. My lab is 1) conducting epidemiologic studies designed to elucidate the relationship between pregnancy and CV risk with an emphasis on understanding the short- and long-term CV effects of adverse pregnancy outcomes; 2) designing and conducting clinical trials to evaluate blood pressure measurement and monitoring in pregnancy and postpartum; and 3) designing and conducting clinical trials examining interventions to reduce CV risk in women who have experienced preeclampsia and other adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Dr. Bello’s work examining the associations between preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy; and peripartum cardiomyopathy, a devastating form of systolic heart failure that affects women at the end of pregnancy and in the early postpartum period, have been used to support a vascular anti-angiogenic hypothesis as the etiology of peripartum cardiomyopathy in women which had previously been described only in murine models. Ongoing efforts by our lab to develop and test novel therapies for peripartum cardiomyopathy are aimed at reducing global maternal mortality.