Honors Program
University Honors
Date of Award
5-2025
Thesis Professor(s)
Cerrone Foster
Thesis Professor Department
<--College of Arts and Sciences-->
Thesis Reader(s)
Melissa Schrift Meaghan Heimbach
Abstract
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. There are various trends that influence the rates of cardiovascular disease in each country. Factors that create these trends involve diet, exercise, genetics, socioeconomic status, and geographical location. Additionally, CVD is typically higher in middle-income and lower-income classes. Hospital routes, rates of poverty, insurance policies, and lifestyle culture are all factors that can impact the time of treatment which in turn affect the rate of CVD. However, we explored in this study the shift in CVD women experience after menopause. Women were excluded from clinical trials until 1986, and the NIH did not require sex as a research factor until 2014, leading to possible discrepancies in equating clinical data of CVD in both women and men. The goal of this study is to compare a possible treatment, the caveolin scaffolding domain (CSD), between males and females. This study specifically investigates cardiac fibrosis after chronic sympathetic stimulation. The explored hypothesis the impact of the caveolin scaffolding domain to decrease the total percentage of fibrosis in both male and female mice in comparison to treatment groups without the domain. Mice were treated with ISO and CSD at 7 months for 3 days. Masson’s Trichome Staining was used to assess cardiac fibrosis. The results do not support the hypothesis that CSD had a significant impact in males or females. The only significant factor in fibrosis was the sex. This is further evidence that sex differences should be explored and tested for each potential treatment. However, due to time limitations of this study, treatment groups had uneven animal models. This may have affected the data collected and further affected the statistical significance of each comparison. For best accuracy, it would be advised that the sample sized is increased.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Withheld
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Price, Crimsyn, "A Sex Comparison on the Effects of Caveolin Scaffolding Domain on Fibrosis Formation After Chronic Sympathetic Stimulation" (2025). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 827. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/827
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
