The National Institutes of Health recently awarded more than $2.4 million to a research team led by Colin Young, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology at the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), to study how cell stress in the brain could impact the risk of obesity-induced hypertension.
Through the study, funded for five years, Young and his team seek to understand what happens in the brain of patients diagnosed with obesity that might lead to changes in stress-related and inflammation-related processes occurring within the cells, which in turn may lead to increased blood pressure. They hypothesize that when an individual becomes obese, it creates cell stress within the brain that can lead to low-grade brain inflammation. Young is working with co-investigator Anastas Popratiloff, MD, PhD, adjunct professor of anatomy and regenerative biology at SMHS, who also serves as director of the GW Nanofabrication and Imaging Center.
