AGEING PLASTICITY · Prefrontal plasticity underpinning resilience against cognitive ageing.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-03-26 → 2022-03-25
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Prefrontal plasticity underpinning resilience against cognitive ageing.
As global life expectancy increases, so do pathological age-related conditions impacting cognition. The worldwide prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease is expected to rise from 46 to 131.5 million affected people in the next 30 years, which will drastically compromise quality of life for many individuals and place a considerable economic burden on society. As acknowledged by the EU Commission, there is an imperative to ‘improve our understanding of the causes and mechanisms underlying…healthy ageing and disease’. Older adults differ vastly in the extent to which their cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and decision making remain healthy. Highlighting sources of interindividual variability in this resilience to cognitive ageing, particularly in the face of neuropathology such as Alzheimer’s Disease, will enhance the development of targeted neurorehabilitation interventions to prevent and redress cognitive decline. The objectives of this project were to examine how resilience to age-related cognitive decline is supported by neuroanatomy (brain structure) and neurophysiology (brain function), and altered through a lifetime of cognitive and social enrichment. We provide increasing evidence that the right hemisphere fronto-parietal networks may be a critical correlate of cognitive resilience in ageing, and put forward a novel framework for investigating oscillatory markers which may vary according to cognitive health using mEEG. Through the use of these state-of-the-art cognitive neuroscience approaches to we aim to highlight optimal ways of altering brain health to benefit cognition, such that we can inform public health advise and translate basic research into concrete societal benefit.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
As global life-expectancy increases so do pathological age-related conditions impacting cognition. The worldwide prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease is expected to rise from 46 to 131.5 million affected people in the next 30 years, which will drastically compromise quality of life for many individuals and place a considerable economic burden on society. As acknowledged by the EU Commission, there is an imperative to ‘improve our understanding of the causes and mechanisms underlying…healthy ageing and disease. Older adults differ vastly in the extent to which their cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and decision making remain healthy. Highlighting sources of interindividual variability in this resilience to cognitive ageing, particularly in the face of neuropathology such as Alzheimer’s Disease will enhance the development of targeted neurorehabilitation interventions to prevent and redress cognitive decline. Several lines of work indirectly indicate the right fronto-parietal network (rFPN) in the brain, particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is critical for healthy cognition in ageing. This proposal will combine advanced cognitive neuroscience techniques to directly investigate whether neurocognitive markers of healthy ageing (i) relate to interindividual differences in white-matter (WM) structural organisation within the rFPN, and (ii) can be improved by upregulating activity within this network. This fellowship will be conducted at the Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology under the supervision of Prof Kia Nobre, world expert on the cognitive neuroscience of attention, and in close collaboration with Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg, leading authority on white matter plasticity at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN).
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD · OxfordCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union