MILWAUKEE — The National Institute of Health awarded Marquette University and the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) a $3.2 million R01 grant, Marquette announced Monday.

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development granted the funding. The study will focus on muscle fatigue in stroke survivors and potential solutions to improve muscle performance. 

What You Need To Know

  • Marquette and the Medical College of Wisconsin receive a $3.2 million NIH R01 award

  • The award will focus on studying muscle fatigue in stroke survivors

  • Allison Hyngstrom from Marquette’s College of Health Sciences and Matt Durand from MCW will take lead on the study

  • The project will also focus on solutions to increase their muscle performance

Allison Hyngstrom, chair and professor of physical therapy in Marquette’s College of Health Sciences, and Matt Durand, associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at MCW, will take point on the project. 

Hyngstrom said that increased fatigability is an understudied result from a stroke.

“This is a clinically meaningful area of study because increased neuromuscular fatigability can negatively affect endurance for activities like walking,” Hyngstrom said in the release. “Also, successful post-stroke rehabilitation strategies require repeated levels of muscle activation and overload to cause functional gains in motor performance.”

Using a non-invasive intervention called ischemic conditioning, both teams will examine the effects of muscle fatigue in the legs of stroke survivors and find ways to improve blood flow in the exercising muscle.

“Our central hypothesis is that people who have suffered a stroke face impaired functional sympatholysis — the mechanism by which the body maintains blood flow to exercising muscles to meet the energy demands of the task — and this results in dysregulated blood flow during exercise,” Durand said in the release. “This exacerbates neuromuscular fatigability and limits motor function.”

Durand said the team’s goal is to determine if muscle performance can be improved through ischemic conditioning and if those improvements stem from increased blood flow to the muscle.

Chris Sundberg, assistant professor of physical therapy at Marquette, Sandra Hunter, professor of exercise science at Marquette, and Brian Schmit, Hammes Family Professor in the Marquette and MCW Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, will also be joining the research team. 

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