Minjie Wu
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Neuroscience
In older adults, dementia most often comes from two problems at once. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
cerebral small vessel disease
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- 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.
- Measure sex differences in brain chemicals linked to vessel aging with whole-brain magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI). Targets include NAA and glutamate (neuron health markers) and myo-inositol (an inflammation marker).
- Determine whether Equol, an oral estrogen-like supplement, improves cerebrovascular health and brain chemistry in participants of the multi-site ACE trial, imaged at 7T.
- Build a machine-learning white matter brain-age model from white matter microstructure features to capture vascular brain aging that gray-matter models miss.
More about the research
The other is cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), damage to the brain's tiny blood vessels, which speeds up AD. Women face a higher SVD-related risk of AD, yet common brain-age tools built from gray-matter shrinkage rate women's brains as 1.5–3.5 years younger than men's. That mismatch suggests these tools miss vascular aging in white matter, the brain's wiring. This project asks whether women's small vessels age faster than men's. It also asks whether Equol, an oral supplement with estrogen-like, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects, can protect them.
Why it matters
Older women carry a greater risk of Alzheimer's disease linked to small vessel disease. By detecting early, reversible vessel and chemical changes and testing whether the oral supplement Equol slows them, this work could guide sex-specific prevention strategies. Treating small vessel disease may be a promising route to lowering Alzheimer's risk in women.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tamer Ibrahim
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Biomedical Engineering
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.
Brian Gold
University of Kentucky, KY·Neuroscience
Test whether low blood-brain barrier water exchange, measured with the new DW-ASL MRI sequence, predicts growth of white matter hyperintensities over about 3 years in healthy older adults.
Malgorzata Marjanska
University of Minnesota, MN·Biomedical Engineering
Develop image-guided automatic 3D placement of the MRS measurement voxel in brain tumors, integrate it with a clinical MRI system, and evaluate its accuracy.
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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