Getting to the heart of the matter
Gillian Rutherford - 11 February 2025
Jad-Julian Rachid. Photo supplied.
Jad-Julian Rachid was two years into his undergraduate degree in biological sciences when his father unexpectedly faced open-heart surgery. Rachid senior had a tear in his aortic valve, likely caused by lifelong high blood pressure.
Along with dealing with the fear of losing his dad, Rachid had to step in and take his father’s place managing the family’s Edmonton restaurant.
It meant getting up at 6 a.m., attending classes all day, then pulling a shift at the restaurant until closing time at 11 p.m.
“I like to believe that I am a hard worker,” Rachid says. “It’s about balancing what’s important and what needs to get done.”
Rachid, now 28, says he learned fast about time management, decision-making and working with people — skills he now uses daily as an award-winning PhD student investigating heart health.
Rachid is one of 21 Canadian doctoral and postdoctoral students to receive the inaugural Heart and Stroke Foundation Personnel Awards for Women’s Heart & Brain Health.
While his father is now thriving thanks to a mechanical heart valve, the experience inspired Rachid to focus on cardiac research. His doctoral research project is investigating how a combination of iron deficiency and high blood pressure during pregnancy can affect mothers’ hearts and long-term health.
Restaurant skills pay off in the research lab
Rachid put his restaurant skills to work in the lab as soon as he started his PhD studies in pediatrics. Choosing a research topic can be a lot like deciding whether to introduce a new item on a menu, he says. You can’t explore a new idea just because it’s fun. There has to be a potential payoff for the business (or human health in this case). But sometimes a little creativity is exactly what is needed.
Rachid’s doctoral supervisor, Stephane Bourque, associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine and Canada Research Chair in Maternal and Perinatal Physiology, gives Rachid credit for bringing the right level of creativity and determination to his lab’s focus.
Bourque is an expert in the harmful effects of iron deficiency on fetal and newborn development and a member of the Women and Children's Health Research Institute. When Rachid joined Bourque's team, he insisted he wanted to expand that to also look at maternal health.
“We had started talking about another project, but he came back to me fairly quickly and said, ‘I really want to explore what’s happening in the moms,” Bourque recalls. “And it turned into a really interesting and relevant question, so I’m quite thankful for that.”
When your results take you by surprise
Rachid points out that pregnancy puts incredible stress on the maternal system. “It’s almost an endurance test for the mother,” he says.
It’s known that about a third of pregnant women around the world become iron deficient, partly because they often start with low iron stores even before the demands of the fetus and the placenta deplete them further. Supplements are often not enough to replenish those stores, due to low absorption rates or accompanying digestive problems. Women may just stop taking them.
Iron deficiency can eventually lead to a more dangerous and chronic condition known as anemia, which impairs the body’s ability to make enough red blood cells to carry needed oxygen. This is harmful for both mother and baby.
Iron levels in a pregnant mother are not always directly correlated to those in the child, the researchers say, but Bourque’s and others’ research has shown that low iron can affect organ development in utero and lead to lifelong problems as babies grow up.
Rachid’s experiments induced either low or normal iron levels in pregnant rats with high blood pressure. The results caught both Rachid and Bourque by surprise.
The first thing they noticed was that the rats that developed anemia during pregnancy saw their blood pressure drop. In these same rats, iron deficiency improved the mothers’ heart function, at least in the short term.
So something the researchers had expected to be totally bad for the mothers — low iron — turned out to have some positive effects.
Both researchers say more study is needed to see what the long-term impacts might be. Some of the team’s other work has already indicated that anemia can cause damage to the mitochondria in the mothers’ hearts, potentially affecting energy generation. They also note that rats’ pregnancies last just three weeks, so humans may react differently over nine months of pregnancy.
For Bourque, these results are an opportunity.
“The least interesting projects are when your hypothesis turns out to be exactly right,” he says. “When you get results you weren’t expecting or aren’t so clear-cut, that forces you to go dig a little bit deeper into the mechanisms,” he says.
“These are biological processes. They’re inherently complex, so it’s really not that surprising. Every time we answer one question, 15 more questions come up.”
As a child, Rachid wanted to be on an F1 racing team and loved working on car engines. Now his passion is researching the mechanics of the human body with a focus on maternal health, a field that until recently has been understudied. He hopes to do postdoctoral work once he’s completed his PhD in a couple of years and eventually teach.
In the meantime, he will continue to follow his research results to new lines of inquiry he hopes will help patients. Already he’s shown that pregnant women who are treated for anemia or iron deficiency should have their blood pressure monitored extra carefully.
“Hypertension is one of the most common morbidities within pregnancy and iron deficiency, affecting 37 per cent of all pregnant women. So the likelihood that these two conditions will overlap is quite high,” he says. “This research will help clinicians develop individual, patient-centred treatment regimens and followup.”
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