Dr. Arora is a physician-scientist currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Division of Cardiovascular Disease at UAB.  He is also the Director of the Cardiovascular Clinical and Translational Research Program and the Cardiovascular Genomics Clinic at UAB.  At the Cardiogenomics Clinic, Dr. Arora is involved in the care of patients with inherited cardiovascular disease with a focus on infiltrative cardiomyopathies including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and cardiac amyloidosis.  His translational research program, supported by multiple grants, integrates epidemiology, prospective clinical trials, and genomics to understand the causal role of natriuretic peptide (NP) deficiency in cardiometabolic diseases. 

Dr. Arora led a series of investigations that established the functional significance of the rs5068 genotype and identified microRNA-425 as a novel negative regulator of atrial NP (ANP) production.  These findings led to the design of a genotype-guided study aimed at investigating the NP response to cardiometabolic perturbations by performing deep metabolic phenotyping.

His interest in the determinants of cardiometabolic diseases led him to successfully complete a mechanistic clinical trial examining racial differences in the NP response to a glucose challenge and investigating the mechanism of NP deficiency in Black individuals.  This led to the conception of a mechanistic study evaluating ANP augmentation to improve cardiometabolic health, specifically resting energy expenditure and insulin sensitivity, in Black individuals.  His recent investigation of the diurnal rhythmicity of NPs established the existence of the NP-RAAS-BP diurnal rhythm axis and that its derangement in obese individuals contributes to their non-dipping nocturnal BP profile.  This led to the conception and design of an investigator-initiated clinical trial investigating a chronopharmacological approach of NP augmentation to improve the nocturnal BP profile in obese individuals.