Dr Angela Atalla

Dr. Angela Atalla joined Imperial College London from her 3rd year as a Specialist Registrar in Respiratory Medicine in the Severn Deanery.

She started as a Clinical Research Fellow based at the Royal Brompton in July 2008 and her PhD focuses on Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB) in patients with Heart Failure. She is supervised by Professors Martin Cowie, Mary Morrell and Anita Simonds and as such is part of both the Health Services Research Team and the Academic Unit of Sleep and Breathing.

She is part of a team involved in the SERVE-HF Study; a randomised controlled trial of adaptive servoventilation in patients with Heart Failure and predominantly central SDB. This study aims to determine if adaptive servoventilation confers a mortality benefit in this group of heart failure patients. As part of this she is conducting a physiological substudy investigating the effect of this novel ventilator on the way that ventilation is controlled by measuring hypercapnic ventilatory and cerebrovascular responses in patient randomised to both the ventilator and the control arms of the SERVE-HF study.

In related work she is investigating the effect of central SDB on activity levels and sleep architecture in this patient group compared with a control population and is interested in the effects of cardiac resynchronisation on chemosensitivity.