Sarah Elzinga
Michigan State University, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Carrying extra weight and having blood sugar that is higher than normal but not yet diabetic, a state called prediabetes, are both extremely common in middle age. Both also raise the odds of memory and thinking problems decades later, including Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Microbiology & Immunology
Physiology
- Topics
cGAS/STING
inflammaging
neuroinflammation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Establish how the cGAS/STING pathway, a DNA-sensing innate immune alarm, and the surrounding inflammatory environment change as obesity and prediabetes progress from midlife to later life, and how this tracks with cognitive impairment.
- Determine whether cGAS/STING signaling specifically within microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, drives cognitive impairment in high-fat-diet-fed animals, comparing mid-life and later-life stages.
- Investigate whether extracellular vesicles, small membrane packages released by cells, carry cGAS/STING-related inflammatory signals between cells of the central nervous system during obesity- and prediabetes-induced cognitive decline with aging.
- Test the hypothesis that abnormal blood lipids and insulin resistance are the upstream triggers that activate inflammatory pathways and transmit inflammatory signals into the central nervous system.
More about the research
Why that happens is unclear, and there are few treatments. One thread connects all of these conditions: chronic, low-grade inflammation that creeps up with age, sometimes called inflammaging. This project asks how metabolic trouble in midlife sets off inflammation inside the brain, and when during that long timeline an intervention would have to arrive to make a difference.
Why it matters
Obesity, metabolic syndrome, and prediabetes affect a large and growing share of the population, and cognitive decline is one of their severe complications with few available treatments. By tracing when inflammation in the brain begins relative to metabolic changes, this work could identify molecular targets such as cGAS/STING and, importantly, the midlife time windows in which early intervention might prevent or slow Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ashok Shetty
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Neuroscience
Test whether nasal delivery of extracellular vesicles from human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neural stem cells in early or late middle age preserves memory and cognition into old age in mice.
Kristian Doyle
University of Arizona, AZ·Neuroscience
Identify the pro-inflammatory lipid species released when myelin and cell membranes break down after stroke, and the inflammatory pathways they trigger in macrophages and microglia.
Peter J Havel
University of California-Davis, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether a high-sugar diet in macaques triggers Alzheimer's-like pathology and blood vessel damage in the hippocampus and default mode network, brain regions for memory and executive function.
The school
Michigan State University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 555 research doctorates a year.
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