Just in time for the catchathon, our biomedical collaborators - the Schaffer-Nishimura Lab, prepared a fresh dataset for us to analyze in Stall Catchers!
The new dataset is focused on the effects of a high fat diet on stalls in the brain in Alzheimer's disease.
We are seeking to understand the cellular mechanisms linking cardiovascular risk factors to Alzheimer's. Analyzing this dataset will be a big push towards understanding this long debated link!
Let's jumpstart the analysis of this dataset during the Catchathon!!
P.S. as we continue to refine our data generation methods, there might be bad movies still in the mix in the new dataset! Help us refine them by selecting the "flag movie" option - we will look through the flagged movies and remove them.
Here's a more detailed explanation from Chris Schaffer (our biomedical collaborator) himself:
Our scientific goal with this dataset is to test the hypothesis that feeding mice a high fat diet will make the capillary stalling the the brain of Alzheimer’s disease mice worse and may increase the incidence of capillary stalls in non Alzheimer’s mice as well.
Cardiovascular risk factors have long been associated with increased risk for developing AD and with more severe cognitive symptoms. The mechanisms linking things like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, or obesity to the incidence and severity of AD, however, remain unclear. These cardiovascular risk factors all tend to increase vascular inflammation. We would like to test the hypothesis that this increased vascular inflammation exacerbates the capillary stalling phenomena and that this contributes to the increased risk for and severity of AD. We aim to test this idea by giving various cardiovascular risk factors to AD mice and evaluating if this exacerbates the capillary stalling, and testing to see whether blocking the capillary stalling tends to decrease the influence of cardiovascular risk factors on AD development and severity. If true, this would provide a cellular mechanism that links cardiovascular risk factors to AD. In the first of this series of experiments, we are exploring the impact of feeding the mice a high-fat and high-salt diet.