Cardiovascular risk factors, physical activity and healthy cognitive ageing

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PhD project strategic theme: Bioscience for an integrated understanding of healthThe project will investigate how cardiovascular health contributes to healthy cognitive ageing. It will develop models using statistical techniques, such as multi-variate data-driven and hypothesis-generated analysis, which will allow the integration of multiple measures of cardiovascular health, with measures of physical activity, neural structure and function, and cognitive performance. A key and novel aspect of the research will be the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data to explore how neural function changes with age. This will be an important advance because MEG is not limited by the age-related changes in vasculature that have been recently observed to confound fMRI studies of ageing (Tsvetanov et al, in press). The research will utilise existing data in the population-based cross-sectional cohort of the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), which has around 700 participants, aged 18-87 years old (Taylor et al, 2017). The first analyses will likely be extensions of two previous studies on Cam-CAN data. These studies linked cardiovascular health and physical activity separately to white matter integrity (Fuhrmann et al, 2019; Strommer et al, 2020). However, it remains unclear whether the link between cardiovascular health on white matter integrity is mediated by physical activity. This PhD project aims to expand on these studies to include many more measures of neural structure and function, in order to better characterise the complex relationships between components of cardiovascular, brain health and cognitive performance in healthy ageing.