The School of Education and Human Development celebrates Wei Xiong, M.D., DPT, for receiving a prestigious award recognizing his leadership in a pivotal study on women's vascular health. Working alongside Dr. Arlette Perry, Director of the Laboratory of Clinical Vascular Function, and laboratory of Clinical and Applied Physiology, Xiong’s research uncovers critical insights into how lifestyle, body composition, and age impact cardiovascular risk.
The award-winning study focuses on vascular health across the female lifespan, with specific, novel findings regarding Asian women. The research challenges traditional assumptions about weight and health.
Dr. Perry identified lifestyle behaviors as the most significant driver of vascular health and cardiac risk reduction across all age groups. She noted a distinct difference in predictors between age groups: for younger women, total body fat impacts vascular health, whereas for older women, the danger lies specifically in intra-abdominal (visceral) fat.
Xiong's analysis provided a deeper cultural lens, particularly regarding Asian women. He found that targeting visceral adipose tissue (VAT) reduction offers a culturally tailored cardiovascular disease prevention strategy. His data also revealed two additional findings specific to Asian women: VAT plays a particularly important role in vascular health across all age groups, with an even more pronounced effect in older women; and while increasing muscle mass protects younger women's cardiovascular health, it may be detrimental in older women.
"For younger women, increasing muscle mass appears to be a protective factor," Xiong said. "In contrast, in older women, greater muscle mass may actually be detrimental, likely due to a combination of poor muscle quality, fat infiltration, and chronic inflammation. For older women, the focus should be on improving muscle quality rather than simply increasing muscle quantity."
These findings highlight the need for age-specific cardiovascular prevention strategies tailored to Asian women, particularly before and after menopause.
When asked about the most surprising finding, Xiong noted the counterintuitive role of muscle mass in older women, a nuance that upends conventional wisdom about strength and health.
The team overcame significant hurdles to collect reliable data from real-world participants. Recruiting "busy, real women", working mothers and professionals with little time to spare, required partnering with community centers, hospitals, and schools to offer early morning, evening, and weekend testing slots. The team reframed participation not as a research favor but as a personal benefit: each participant received a detailed vascular health checkup and lifestyle recommendations. Word spread, referrals followed, and the study population grew to more than 800 women strong of different ages, body composition, fitness levels, and backgrounds.
Maintaining consistent measurement standards across years and multiple research assistants posed an equally demanding challenge. The team developed detailed standard operating procedures, conducted unified training, and ran regular quality checks. Any unusual data trend triggered immediate investigation, retraining, and recalibration.
The third challenge: making complex data actionable. The dataset spans weight, waist circumference, visceral fat, blood pressure, diet, physical activity, and menopausal status. Rather than leaving clinicians and patients to navigate that complexity, the team used advanced statistical methods to distill clear, practical guidance, such as the finding that waist circumference and visceral fat are more harmful to vascular health than overall body weight, and that exercise and blood pressure control can partially offset the damage from poor diet.
"Our greatest challenge," Xiong said, "is to collect high-quality vascular and lifestyle data consistently over time in the context of real women's busy lives, and to turn that complex information into actionable health advice that doctors can use, and everyday women can understand and follow."
If anyone is interested in being a part of the groundbreaking work in the Women’s Vascular Health Project, please contact VascularFunctionLab5202@outlook.com
