Stuart Dean Russell, MD

Stuart D. Russell, M.D. went to medical school at the University of Washington before coming to Johns Hopkins to do his Internal Medicine residency from 1991 to 1994. He then went to Duke University Medical Center for his Cardiology fellowship. After completing his fellowship, he went to UCLA Medical Center to do an additional fellowship in advanced heart failure and cardiac transplantation. Dr. Russell then returned to Duke where he was the Medical Director of Cardiac Transplant and the Associate Director of Heart Failure to 1999. He came back to Johns Hopkins in 2004 to be the Chief of Heart Failure and Transplantation. Dr Russell is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and Director of the new Heart Failure Bridge Clinic which provides multidisciplinary care to adults with heart failure reducing hospitalizations through intensified and readily available routine outpatient care and access including IV diuresis.

Dr. Russells current research efforts include his work in two primary areas: left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) and exercise physiology in heart failure. The newest pumps are commonly used in patients with end-stage heart failure as a bridge to transplant or instead of transplant all together. LVADs have interesting physiological properties that Dr. Russell is working hard to understand, to maximize its efficacy in patients. The most important physiological change for patients is that they no longer have pulsatile blood flow and instead have a continuous flow of blood. At a very practical level, this results in a lack of pulse and therefore is very difficult to measure blood pressure. Dr. Russell has shown that the return of a Doppler signal is the best correlate of blood pressure for most patients. However, he and his team are working to discover alternative means of measuring blood pressure in these patients. Dr. Russells team has also demonstrated that patients with LVADs are at increased risk for GI bleeds, stroke, and clotting of the pump. In collaboration with his basic science colleagues, Dr. Russell is working to understand the mechanisms of these clotting abnormalities and also find risk factors for these side effects in order to prevent their occurrence. His other area of interest is on exercise physiology in heart failure patients. Shortness of breath and fatigue are two common symptoms of heart failure, and they often cause patients to stop exercise. These symptoms are not always the same in the patient population, and Dr. Russell is working to better understand what triggers each, in hopes of leading to beneficial therapeutic changes for patients. Additionally, Dr. Russell is working to determine the cause of shortness of breath in patients with normal heart function. This is a common clinical problem. In order to better understand this occurrence, Dr. Russell will perform invasive exercise tests, and measure both heart and lung function and the interactions between the two.