Kevin O’Gallagher

Kevin O’Gallagher explains his role within the Cardiovascular Clinical Academic Group for this KHPeople personal profile.

In particular, he expands on a proposed study to investigate the relationship between aortic pathology and dementia that could one day transform future patient therapies.

Please introduce yourself and describe your role within King’s Health Partners

I am a Clinician Scientist with a clinical role is as Honorary Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence within the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences, King’s College Hospital NHS FT. 

I completed a PhD in Cardiovascular Medicine at King’s College London under the supervision of Prof Ajay Shah and Dr Andrew Webb. While my primary research interest is in the study of nitric oxide signalling within the cardiovascular system in health and disease, my Clinician Scientist role has developed to cut across many of the key themes within the BHF Centre. 

The ethos of the BHF Centre is to stimulate and facilitate interactions across disciplines and this position has allowed me to forge collaborations both within the university and with national/international partners.

Please introduce us to your research

Under the auspices of the Aortovascular Clinical Academic Group (CAG), we are planning a study to investigate the relationship between aortic pathology and dementia. We propose a prospective longitudinal cohort study in which we will perform neuroimaging and cognitive testing on patients with abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), as well as collecting tissue samples at the time of any surgery, to obtain a detailed picture on the interaction between aortic disease, cerebrovascular disease, and dementia.  

The study will generate key data on the role of neuroimaging biomarkers and will facilitate the development of clinical prediction tools for cognitive impairment in this patient group.

The planning of this research has benefited from the wide range of inter-disciplinary research at King’s College London.  Our team includes experienced researchers from vascular biology (Prof Shanahan), Cardiothoracic surgery (Prof Pepper), neurosciences (Dr Johnson) and neuroimaging (Dr Zelaya) as well as the wider Aortovascular CAG group. Furthermore, we engaged with the university’s informatics team, using the Cogstack platform to generate pilot data for the study. 

What is the potential of your research and how will it benefit patients?

The potential of this research is to provide further detail on how disease in larger arteries is related to dementia.  It is likely that this research will be the starting point for several strands of further investigation in both clinical and basic science research. 

Improved prediction and prognostication of cognitive impairment in those with vascular disease has great potential to benefit patients, not only through better disease detection, but also via the future exploration of therapies to arrest cognitive decline in this patient group. 

If you would like to find out more about Kevin O’Gallagher’s research, you can email him directly at kevin.o'gallagher@kcl.ac.uk