The Weinkauf lab is located at the University of Arizona and focuses on translational science to better understand and treat patients with cardiovascular disease. The lab’s strength comes from its strong collaborations across surgery, engineering, immunology, medical imaging and neuroscience specialties with a unifying goal of developing better tools to study what we feel are undertreated or mistreated vascular diseases.
It's often that diseases can only be studied if they can be quantified.
Cardiovascular Brain Health: Although growing evidence indicates that “asymptomatic” carotid artery stenosis adversely affects the brain, brain health outcomes are Not evaluated or treated clinically. There are many good reasons for this to be sure, but our hypothesis is that if the brain is not getting its normal blood supply, its unlikely to function normally. This topic can be convoluted because we are forced into defining what is normal blood supply, normal brain aging, normal cognition? As an example, consider the blood supply to your leg: If your leg doesn’t have adequate blood, you can often still walk on a flat road, but it would be impossible to walk up a hill or run a marathon. What is the equivalent for the brain? What does it look like if a brain can walk, but can't run a marathon?
To study this, we use longitudinal clinical studies and a wide array of advanced brain imaging, blood flow imaging and neurocognitive testing to quantify the relationship between carotid artery stenosis and brain structure and function. We found that carotid stenosis increases risk for key pathological brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s and non-Alzheimer’s dementia and were awarded a NIA RO1 (2021-2026) to further study these associations. This project has resulted in novel imaging techniques, patents and exciting scientific findings. We hope our work will improve Brain Health for patients in the years to come.
See if you pre-qualify to enroll our studyMicrovascular disease: Microvascular disease (MVD) is disease in the smallest blood vessels and can affect the whole body from the brain to the foot. We study whether microvascular versus macrovascular disease in the brain may have differential roles in cognitive health. In addition, this project tries to understand how MVD affects wound development, healing and risk for limb loss in the feet and legs. MVD is poorly understood and poorly studied in large part because it cannot be easily quantified. Our projects here aim to validate/develop tools that can be used clinically to quantify MVD. With this ability, we will be able to better study/understand the role MVD plays in peripheral vascular care and limb salvage.
