Session 3I: The Impact of Hypercholesterolemia and Obesity on Wound-Healing

Hypercholesterolemia is a common health condition where there is an excess and often dangerously high amount of LDL-cholesterol in the blood that can be diet-related or genetic. When an injury occurs, the body starts the process of wound healing through closure of the wound by the formation of new tissue, which includes fresh extracellular matrix, skin cells, and blood vessels. This study investigates how hypercholesterolemia affects the wound healing process. More specifically, the first part of the study focuses on the effects of hypercholesterolemia on deposition of the extracellular matrix and investigates the presence of lipids. Two mouse are used in this study: (i) ApoE KO, genetically modified to have excess amount of cholesterol, and (ii) wild type mice fed high fat diet. Both models were compared to age-matched and gender-matched wild type mice fed a normal chow diet. Two models of wound healing were implemented: matrigel plugs and skin punch biopsies. Our results show that in the matrigel assay there was no significant difference in the amount of collagen, a major component of the extracellular matrix between all the mouse models. For the skin punch model, we found that ApoE mice wounds have significantly higher amount of collagen during the wound healing process