The Cardiovascular System and its Impact on Human Health
Talk by Wayne Newhauser, Professor (retired), Louisiana State University
Human health depends on good blood circulation because it supplies the body's vital organs with enough oxygen and nutrients needed to operate. When blood flows throughout the body, the lungs, heart and muscles function properly and efficiently, and one feels healthy and physically fit. Blood delivers the oxygen and nutrients each organ needs. In addition, good circulation allows one to avoid or fight off many sicknesses, as the circulating white blood cells in your immune system reach the parts of the body where they are needed. Blood flow also carries away carbon dioxide and other byproducts of metabolism. For all of these reasons, a healthy cardiovascular system is essential to maintaining or restoring good overall health.
Impaired cardiovascular function can cause many types of health problems, ranging from reduced quality of life to death. For example, if the flow of blood to the brain is disrupted (ischemia), it can cause stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and a myriad of other problems. If a vessel leaks just a bit more than it should, the leakage can cause damage to nearby tissue.
For example, age-related macular degeneration (a leading cause of blindness) occurs when vessels of the eye leak fluid that damages cells in the nearby retina. Generally speaking, poor blood circulation can harm any organ in the body and cause many types of maladies. Hence, the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of these maladies depend on a good understanding of the cardiovascular system. Yet, despite decades of research and many medical advances, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death, taking about 18 million lives each year worldwide. This suggests there are important aspects of the cardiovascular system we don’t yet understand, which is the focus of Prof. Newhauser's research laboratory.
In this lecture, we will review the healthy cardiovascular system and how it works, as well as what happens when things go wrong. With an eye toward reducing morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular and related diseases, we will explore recent research breakthroughs in high-performance scientific computing that will lead to vastly improved understanding of the human cardiovascular system. One application is the so-called digital twin model, where an individual person obtains a personalized and realistic computational model of their body. This emerging technology offers a pathway to reducing cardiovascular and related diseases where traditional approaches have failed.
$10 admission; free for BSMA members (you can become a member on our Join Us page).
May 6, 2026, [Time TBD] at Fuller Lodge.
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Dr. Wayne Newhauser is a board certified and licensed medical physicist. After earning degrees in nuclear engineering and medical physics from the University of Wisconsin, he worked at the German National Standards Laboratory (PTB), Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Newhauser has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, leads federal research grants, and mentors students and post-doctoral fellows. In his spare time, he serves in leadership roles of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the American Nuclear Society.
Dr. Newhauser's research team focuses on cancer prevention and cancer survivorship. Specifically, we seek to better understand the risks of treatment-related health problems faced by cancer survivors. The long term goal is to provide an enhanced based of evidence for making clinical decisions (e.g., selection of radiation treatment modality) and health care policy decisions (rational allocation of scarce health care resources). Our recent research has focused on children and young adults, e.g., with tumors of the central nervous system and Hodgkin Disease. We have also studied treatments for cancer of the prostate, liver, lung, and other sites. Our research examines advanced radiotherapies, such as intensity modulated proton and photon therapies, as well as conventional photon therapy. This research is trans-disciplinary, including medical physics, software and nuclear engineering, high performance computing, statistics, cancer prevention and epidemiology, and oncology.
