BIOSKETCH AND RESEARCH INTERESTS

Suzanne Oparil, MD, FACC, FAHA, FASH, FAPS is Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, Section Chief of Vascular Biology and Hypertension and Director of the Vascular Biology and Hypertension Program of the Division of Cardiovascular Disease in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Dr. Oparil graduated with an A.B. degree from Cornell University in 1961, where she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and earned her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1965) in New York, where she was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha. She received training in internal medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and then completed her medical residency and cardiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.  Dr. Oparil began her career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in 1971 and received promotion to Associate Professor in 1975.  She joined the UAB faculty as an Associate Professor of Medicine in 1977, was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1981 and subsequently appointed as Director of the UAB Vascular Biology and Hypertension Program, where she has served with extraordinary distinction for over 30 years. Most recently, Dr. Oparil received special recognition for distinguished service to UAB by appointment as Distinguished Professor in the UAB Department of Medicine (2014).

Dr. Oparil has held important advisory positions with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including membership on task forces, expert panels and peer-review and guidelines committees. She has served on the Panel on Scientific Boundaries for Review, NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR); Special Emphasis Panel (SEP), NIH Loan Repayment Program; and the NIH Joint National Committee. She has served as expert writing member for: Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) Guideline for Blood Pressure Management in Chronic Kidney Disease; various AHA guidelines and consensus documents and various national and international writing committees in hypertension research. Most recently, she served as Co-chair of the Joint National Committee charged with developing U.S. guidelines for the prevention, detection, evaluation and treatment of high blood pressure (James PA, et al. (JNC 8). JAMA 311(5):507-520, 2014).

Dr. Oparil has served as President of the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Society of Hypertension (ASH), and served as the first female president of the American Federation for Clinical Research (AFCR) (later renamed American Federation for Medical Research; AFMR). She has received numerous honorary memberships, lectureships and distinguished awards for her contributions to academic medicine, particularly the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease, including the AHA Council for High Blood Pressure Irving Page-Alva Bradley Lifetime Achievement Award (2002), the Harriet Dunstan Award, sponsored by the  AHA Council for High Blood Pressure Research (2008), the Virginia Franz ’22 Award for Distinguished Women in Medicine, presented  by Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (2010), the Dr. John Foerster Distinguished Lecture Award for Lifetime Achievements in the Field of Cardiovascular Medicine, given by the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences (2011); the Distinguished Scientist Award (Translational Domain), presented by the American College of Cardiology (2013); and was elected as Honorary Member to the Association of University Cardiologists by the Council of the Association of University Cardiologists (2013). She is member of a number of prestigious societies, including the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the Association of American Physicians (AAP), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM; formerly IOM), and the Association of University Cardiologists (AUC).

Dr. Oparil is internationally recognized for her contributions to the fields of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Throughout her career, she has focused on translating her robust findings from the basic science laboratory into the clinic and into the arena of randomized controlled clinical trials. She made many seminal contributions to vascular biology and hypertension research and has an impressive publication record of > 775 peer-reviewed articles on topics in clinical cardiology, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular pathologies related to aging, vascular biology and hypertension and population science related to cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Oparil’s general research themes are the pathogenesis of vascular disease and the pathophysiology and treatment of high blood pressure.

Dr. Oparil continues to break new ground in cardiovascular and women’s health research and is dedicated to answering important public health questions by using both basic science and clinical research approaches. Dr. Oparil has made several groundbreaking fundamental discoveries which have had a high impact on clinical medicine and on the health of the nation. She has made a number of important observations concerning the role of angiotensin-converting enzyme in physiologic and pathophysiologic states. Dr. Oparil’s fundamental research interests focus on mechanisms of estrogen-mediated vasoprotection and hormonal modulation of inflammatory responses to vascular injury. She is also active in clinical investigation, particularly in the area of novel approaches to the treatment of hypertension and related target organ damage, and in the care of patients with hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Oparil also oversees a robust training program that combines basic, translational, clinical and population aspects of cardiovascular disease and hypertension research. She has served as Program Director/Principal Investigator of this longstanding NIH/NHLBI postdoctoral training program, T32 HL007457, “Mechanisms of Hypertension and Cardiovascular Diseases” since 1985 and has directly/jointly mentored over 35 graduate students, predoctoral or postdoctoral fellows and residents over the last 20+ years. Dr. Oparil has served on countless UAB student dissertation/Ph.D. defense committees and has supervised many short-term summer trainees in either her basic/translational research laboratory, or through observerships, mini-clinical rotations or hands-on bedside training.

Dr. Oparil has been continuously funded by the NIH for over 30 years and has over 30 years’ experience in leadership experience in the design, recruitment, analysis and dissemination of results of large multicenter clinical trials, including ALLHAT, LIFE, Symplicity HTN-3, and most recently, the NIH/NHLBI-sponsored Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT). Dr. Oparil is Principal Investigator and Director for the SPRINT UAB Clinical Center Network (CCN), supervising over 20 clinical sites in the U.S. and Puerto Rico with 1,950 enrolled participants. This important work was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (SPRINT Research Group. N Engl J Med. 373:2103-2116, 2015), revealing that maintaining systolic blood pressure at lower than currently recommended levels can greatly reduce cardiovascular complications and deaths in older adults.

The main finding of SPRINT is that targeting systolic blood pressure of < 120 mm Hg resulted in lower rates of a composite primary outcome of fatal and non-fatal major cardiovascular events (myocardial infarction, other acute coronary syndrome, stroke, heart failure or death from cardiovascular causes). The benefits of intensive treatment on cardiovascular disease outcomes were so large that the blood pressure intervention component of SPRINT was stopped early by the director of the NHLBI on the advice of the trial’s data and safety monitoring board. The intensive intervention, which achieved a mean systolic BP of 121.4 mm Hg at one year, reduced rates of the primary composite outcome by 25%, as well as all-cause mortality by 27%, compared to the standard intervention, which achieved a mean systolic BP of 136.2 mm Hg. Separation between treatment groups was apparent at 1 year for the primary outcome and at 2 years for all-cause mortality. There was a 38% reduction in relative risk of heart failure and a 43% reduction in relative risk of death from cardiovascular causes in the intensive-treatment group. The number needed to treat with the intensive intervention over the 3.26 year follow-up period to prevent one primary outcome event was 61; to prevent one death from any cause was 90. The benefits of intensive treatment were consistent in all prespecified subgroups, including those < 75 or ≥ 75 years of age, with or without previous chronic kidney disease or cardiovascular disease, black or non-black.

A Randomized Trial of Intensive versus Standard Blood-Pressure Control.

SPRINT Research Group, Wright JT Jr, Williamson JD, Whelton PK, Snyder JK, Sink KM, Rocco MV, Reboussin DM, Rahman M, Oparil S, Lewis CE, Kimmel PL, Johnson KC, Goff DC Jr, Fine LJ, Cutler JA, Cushman WC, Cheung AK, Ambrosius WT. Collaborators (844)

BACKGROUND:
The most appropriate targets for systolic blood pressure to reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality among persons without diabetes remain uncertain.

METHODS:
We randomly assigned 9361 persons with a systolic blood pressure of 130 mm Hg or higher and an increased cardiovascular risk, but without diabetes, to a systolic blood-pressure target of less than 120 mm Hg (intensive treatment) or a target of less than 140 mm Hg (standard treatment). The primary composite outcome was myocardial infarction, other acute coronary syndromes, stroke, heart failure, or death from cardiovascular causes.

RESULTS:
At 1 year, the mean systolic blood pressure was 121.4 mm Hg in the intensive-treatment group and 136.2 mm Hg in the standard-treatment group. The intervention was stopped early after a median follow-up of 3.26 years owing to a significantly lower rate of the primary composite outcome in the intensive-treatment group than in the standard-treatment group (1.65% per year vs. 2.19% per year; hazard ratio with intensive treatment, 0.75; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.64 to 0.89; P<0.001). All-cause mortality was also significantly lower in the intensive-treatment group (hazard ratio, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.60 to 0.90; P=0.003). Rates of serious adverse events of hypotension, syncope, electrolyte abnormalities, and acute kidney injury or failure, but not of injurious falls, were higher in the intensive-treatment group than in the standard-treatment group.

CONCLUSIONS:
Among patients at high risk for cardiovascular events but without diabetes, targeting a systolic blood pressure of less than 120 mm Hg, as compared with less than 140 mm Hg, resulted in lower rates of fatal and nonfatal major cardiovascular events and death from any cause, although significantly higher rates of some adverse events were observed in the intensive-treatment group. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01206062.).

Wright JT Jr, Williamson JD, Whelton PK, Snyder JK, Sink KM, Rocco MV, Reboussin DM, Rahman M, Oparil S, Lewis CE, Kimmel PL, Johnson KC, Goff DC Jr, Fine LJ, Cutler JA, Cushman WC, Cheung AK, Ambrosius WT; SPRINT Research Group. A randomized trial of intensive versus standard blood-pressure control. N Engl J Med. 373(22):2103-2116. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1511939. Epub 2015 Nov 9. (Nov 2015).


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