Item Details

title

Association of Undernutrition with the Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors Hypertension and Chronic Kidney Disease in Youth

author

McMillan, Kayla

abstract

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States despite significant improvements in treatments, largely due to limitations in primordial and primary prevention. The past 50 years has seen an increase in youth developing chronic diseases, in particular cardiovascular disease risk factors. Convincing evidence has demonstrated that early-life exposures lead to the development of these risk factors and cardiovascular disease later in life. Hypertension and chronic kidney disease remain two of the most common risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. It is well documented that cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease are associated with the development of undernutrition, especially in youth, which further increases the risk of morbidity and mortality. However, it remains unknown if undernutrition itself can cause cardiovascular disease risk factors of hypertension and chronic kidney disease. We set out to address these knowledge gaps by investigating the causal effect of undernutrition on these outcomes in a preclinical juvenile rodent model paired with a retrospective cohort study. Our preclinical juvenile rat model demonstrated undernutrition is associated with higher risks of hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and worse cardiovascular health. In the preclinical rat model, juvenile rats exposed to undernutrition had a worsened eGFR over time, increased systolic and diastolic blood pressure over time, reductions in cardiac function over time, and greater increases in arterial stiffness over time when compared to the control animals. Similarly, in the clinical study, youth with undernutrition developed blood pressures in the hypertension range sooner than the control cohort but did not show greater risk of development of incident hypertension or chronic kidney disease.

subject

Cardiovascular diseases

Chronic kidney disease

Hypertension

Translational study

Undernutrition

Youth

contributor

Schaich, Christopher L (advisor)

Bagley, Kiri (committee member)

Solberg-Woods, Leah (committee member)

date

2024-05-23T08:36:17Z (accessioned)

2024-05-23T08:36:17Z (available)

2024 (issued)

degree

Biomedical Science – MS (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/109435 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis