Tamer Ibrahim
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Disease of the brain's smallest blood vessels, called small vessel disease (SVD), often occurs alongside Alzheimer's disease (AD), but why the two are linked is unclear. Some of the link may come from two separate kinds of damage adding up.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
small vessel disease
cerebral microangiopathy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Measure small vessel shape, cerebrovascular reactivity (how brain vessels respond to demand) and cerebrospinal fluid flow with 7T MRI in 60 older adults without dementia, comparing amyloid-positive and amyloid-negative people.
- Develop new 7T MRI hardware, scan methods and analysis tools with academic, industry and FDA partners to image small vessels and fluid flow more clearly while managing radiofrequency heating of tissue.
- Rescan participants after two years with both the original protocol and the newly developed technology to track changes and validate the new imaging biomarkers of preclinical Alzheimer's disease.
- Test how small vessel disease, reduced vessel pulsation and impaired CSF clearance of amyloid-beta relate to one another in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease.
More about the research
The two may also drive each other. For example, inflammation around amyloid-beta (Aβ) plaques, the protein clumps found in AD, may damage small vessels. An emerging idea is that when small arteries pulse less, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the fluid around the brain, clears amyloid less well. Understanding these links could reveal targets for prevention and treatment.
Why it matters
Changes in small blood vessels and fluid clearance may help put people on the path to Alzheimer's disease before symptoms appear. Better 7T MRI measures of these changes could help detect preclinical Alzheimer's disease. They could also point to targets for prevention or treatment, which could benefit older adults at risk of dementia.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Minjie Wu
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether women show faster cerebrovascular aging than men. Use 7T MRI measures of blood-brain barrier function, small artery and vein shape (VesselMapper, BrainVein) and white matter hyperintensities.
Peiying Liu
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Develop normalized cerebrovascular reactivity (nCVR) MRI, which uses oxygen-breathing responses to correct CO2-breathing responses. Test whether it is more reproducible and better at detecting reduced reactivity than standard BOLD-based CVR.
Arvind Caprihan
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience
Provide advanced MRI to Alzheimer's center studies, including blood-brain barrier permeability, quantitative T1 and T2 mapping, and cerebrovascular reactivity, alongside the standard SCAN dementia imaging protocol.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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