About
Dr Leona Dowman is a senior exercise physiologist at Austin Health and postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University. She has extensive experience in both research and clinical care for people with interstitial lung disease (ILD), specifically in pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) and the management of oxygen requirements during exercise.
For her PhD she led a multi-site RCT which defined the benefits of pulmonary rehabilitation for ILD, the largest trial of pulmonary rehabilitation for ILD conducted anywhere in the world.
She is currently leading the first RCT comparing high intensity interval training to the traditional method of moderate intensity continuous training in fibrotic ILD across four Australian centres. Her next research focus will look at how to identify ILD patients at risk of developing pulmonary hypertension in ILD and to evaluate whether oxygen therapy has a preventive effect on pulmonary hypertension in ILD.