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Abstract:
Hypertension is a known risk factor in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) development and progression. Ratmodels of AD have increasingly been used to study AD neurodegenerative progression. Developingclinically relevant models of AD that reflect the comorbidities observed in patients such as hypertensionis the logical next step. Moreover, the use of neuroimaging techniques has not been widely used to assessthe translational significance of a hypertensive AD rat model. To address this limitation and understandwhether a hypertensive AD rat model mimics the changes in brain volume seen in comorbid AD andhypertension, we took MRI scans (7 T Bruker scanner) over the whole brain using a FLASH sequence(0.2 mm × 0.2 mm × 0.2 mm spatial resolution) of 30 male and female hypertensive +/- AD rats andevaluated the differences in brain volumes between AD+ and AD- animals. The neuroimaging softwareAFNI (Analysis of Functional Neuroimages) and customized algorithms in Matlab were used to mapbrain regions of interest, and subsequently calculate the brain volumes in units of mm3. We found anincrease in overall brain volume in AD+ hypertensive male rats (N=6) vs. AD- hypertensive male rats(N=8), as well as in AD+ hypertensive female rats (N=8) compared to AD- hypertensive female rats(N=8). We are also analyzing the hippocampal volumes and plan to present these data. Our data suggeststhat a hypertensive AD rat model is effective in portraying the synergistic role that hypertension has onthe neurodegenerative effect of AD.
