UA Undergraduate Investigates How Gender Influences Stroke Response
UA researcher Sergio Salguero has a passion for understanding human consciousness and expanding what we know about the functions of the brain.

By Sergio Salguero, UA Undergraduate Biology Research Program
Sept. 21, 2016


Neuroscience has always been fascinating to me, but my passion lies in earning my doctorate and studying consciousness — how to quantify it, preserve it and, more curiously, transfer it.

I chose the University of Arizona for the large campus environment, the quality of the ongoing research and the fact that I could stay in-state.

I am now an Environmental Health Sciences-Transformative Research Undergraduate Experience, or EHS-TRUE, scholar and currently work in Helena Morrison's lab studying ischemic stroke. EHS-TRUE's mission focuses on researching issues that have a direct impact on environmental health and the greater community.

A stroke is caused by the blockage of oxygen to the brain that causes injury to the brain's anatomy and physiology. Young men have a higher risk of having a stroke than women do. However, after menopause, a woman's risk of having a stroke and brain injury after stroke is increased when compared with men.

Brain injury can have devastating effects on speech, language, emotional health and behavior, and it can cause paralysis. Stroke incidence is expected to increase as the population ages, and therefore it is important to find ways to minimize the debilitating effects of brain injury after ischemic stroke.

We address this problem by studying the contribution that brain immune cells make to the development of brain injury after ischemic stroke.

During a stroke, the immune system immediately responds to the injury by beginning a cascade of inflammatory responses, many of which are mediated by the microglia — the brain's immune cell. The inflammatory response is paramount for wound healing to occur. Specifically, microglia begins phagocytosis — the clearing of bacteria and other material — almost immediately after the stroke and allows the wound to commence healing.

However, inflammation and microglia actions may be a double-edged sword.

At a certain but unknown time point, microglia phagocytosis malfunctions and exacerbates the stroke injury. In short, we hypothesize that beneficial microglial phagocytosis becomes detrimental over time and that this rate of change is gender- and menopause-specific.

We use a pre-clinical model to observe gender and menopausal differences in the neuroinflammatory responses after ischemic stroke with a focus on microglia phagocytosis.

We study gender differences in mechanisms of brain injury because stroke affects men and women differently throughout their lifetime. Morrison states that "by studying sex differences, we may reveal microglia mechanisms that are therapeutic in one sex but absent or detrimental in the other sex. Understanding these differences will lead to not only more thorough understanding of ischemic stroke but also more precise stroke treatments."

UA Honors College student Sergio Salguero is a junior majoring in neuroscience with a minor in Spanish. As an EHS-TRUE scholar, Salguero works with Helena Morrison, an assistant professor of nursing, who is advancing pre-clinical stroke research. The support for this research comes from the UA, the College of Nursing, the Undergraduate Biology Research Program and the EHS-TRUE program, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health. The last two programs allow for undergraduate students to participate in paid internships during the summer and academic year in order to prepare scholars for higher education.

Kim Young and Helena Morrison contributed to this article.                                                     

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Helena Morrison

UA College of Nursing

520-626-6570

h.morrison@arizona.edu

Sergio Salguero

UA College of Science

520-360-4255

sergiosalguero@email.arizona.edu