Justin Zachariah
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Blood vessels normally stretch a little with each heartbeat. When the aorta, the body's main artery, grows stiff, blood pressure rises and the risk of future high blood pressure and heart disease goes up.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Physiology
- Topics
arterial stiffness
aortic stiffness
pulse wave velocity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Compare six months of oral carnitine supplementation with placebo in 166 adolescents with high triglycerides for effect on aortic stiffness, measured as carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity, while monitoring adverse events.
- Test whether carnitine supplementation alters long-chain fatty acid oxidation, measured as lower long-chain acylcarnitines by metabolomics, and whether that improves insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) and lowers triglycerides.
- Separate direct from indirect effects along the proposed chain from carnitine through fatty acid oxidation, insulin resistance and lipids to change in arterial stiffness.
- Estimate the direct causal effect of carnitine on arterial stiffness by Mendelian randomization, using gene variants associated with serum carnitine, and test whether a carnitine genetic risk score modifies who benefits from supplementation.
More about the research
Stiffness measured already in adolescence predicts these outcomes, and treatment guidelines treat severe stiffening as a reason to push blood-pressure medication harder. Still, the causes beyond aging and obesity are unclear, which leaves little to target in young people whose vessels have not yet changed irreversibly. Preliminary data from teens at weight-loss summer camps showed that stiffness improved not with weight change but with change in blood levels of carnitine, a small molecule that helps cells burn fat and handle sugar. Carnitine could affect vessel stiffness through insulin resistance, which in turn influences vessel tone, scarring of the vessel wall, lipid changes and sugar-modified proteins known as advanced glycation end products.
Why it matters
Arterial stiffening sets a life-course path toward high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, and adolescence may be the point where that path can still be redirected. If carnitine proves to be a cause, it could support future trials of a low-cost supplement to prevent or treat stiffening, and findings on insulin resistance and blood lipids in this age group could guide broader prevention. Carnitine-related gene variants could help identify susceptible youth before artery changes become irreversible.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Maria Alicia Carrillo-Sepulveda
New York Institute of Technology, NY·Physiology
Test whether 2KR mice, engineered to mimic PPAR gamma without acetyl tags, are protected from aortic stiffness and high blood pressure when made obese with a western diet.
Jeffrey Rade
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether urinary TXB2-MGFR, a kidney-corrected urine marker of thromboxane production, predicts hospitalization, death and disease severity in 3,252 heart failure patients from the EMPEROR trials, and how its 12-week change tracks treatment response.
Zhen Yue Jiang
Boston University, MA·Physiology
Test whether neutrophil elastase (NE) drives vascular leakage, inflammation and fibrosis by activating PAR2 and ENaC signaling in vascular endothelial and smooth muscle cells, using cell culture and mouse studies.
The school
Baylor College of Medicine: 38 labs on PI Pages, $881M a year on research, 115 research doctorates a year.
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