Neural correlates of cognitive fatigue and bright light treatment in older adults

老年人认知疲劳与强光治疗的神经相关性

• 批准号: 9789133
• 负责人: Hengyi Rao
• 金额: $ 20.13万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-09-30 至 2022-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9789133
• 关键词: Accidents; Adult; Affect; Age; Aging; Attention; Automobiles; Basal Ganglia; Base of the Brain; Behavior; Biological Markers; Brain; Brain imaging; Caring; Cerebrovascular Circulation; Chronic Disease; Clinical; Cognitive; Data; Dementia; Disease; Elderly; Exposure to; Family; Fatigue; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; High Prevalence; Human; Imaging Techniques; Impaired cognition; Individual; Intervention; Knowledge; Light; Malignant Neoplasms; Measurement; Medical; Mental Fatigue; Mental disorders; Methods; Parkinson Disease; Patient Self-Report; Performance; Perfusion; Phototherapy; Population; Prefrontal Cortex; Psyche structure; Quality of life; Reproducibility; Research; Rest; Risk; Safety; Sampling; Security; Sleep Deprivation; Spin Labels; Stroke; Structure; Symptoms; Task Performances; Testing; Thalamic structure; Transportation; Traumatic Brain Injury; United States; Visit; Workload; Workplace; aging brain; aging population; alertness; behavioral impairment; cognitive performance; common symptom; cost; experience; improved; individual response; middle age; multimodality; neglect; nervous system disorder; neural correlate; neuroimaging; neuromechanism; performance tests; response; social; societal costs; vigilance

PROJECT SUMMARY Fatigue is nearly a universal experience in the aged population and a very common clinical complaint. More than 20% of the United States population suffers from fatigue, which accounts for 10-15 million doctor visits every year. Cognitive or mental fatigue due to continuous workload, insufficient sleep, or illness significantly reduces quality of life, impairs cognitive performance, and increases the risk of automobile and workplace errors and accidents, at a societal cost of billions of dollars annually. Older people suffer significantly more from fatigue symptoms than younger individuals, yet the neural correlates underlying fatigue and its countermeasures on brain function have rarely been studied and remain largely unknown. Using multimodal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we have successfully examined the neural correlates of cognitive fatigue in healthy young and middle aged adults after prolonged mental workload. Our data demonstrate that cognitive fatigue may be associated with altered resting brain function in the default mode network (DMN), frontoparietal attention network, thalamus, and basal ganglia regions. However, given significant structural and functional brain changes in these networks during aging, it remains unknown if fatigue will affect the aged brain in the same manner. The proposed research will combine our established multimodal functional MRI approach and validated fatigue paradigm to examine the neural correlates of cognitive fatigue after continuous mental workload in N=40 older adults (age between 55-85 years). We also propose to evaluate the efficacy of bright light treatment, a low-cost, non-pharmacological, and noninvasive intervention for promoting alertness, as a potential countermeasure for restoring fatigued brain function and improving performance after prolonged cognitive workload in the elderly. This study will test the hypothesis that cognitive fatigue will be associated with reduced resting brain activity and connectivity in the DMN, thalamus, and frontoparietal network in older adults, while bright light treatment will reduce fatigue symptoms by mitigating the brain function changes in these networks. The new knowledge gained from this study will have relevance not only for optimizing human performance and promoting safety of elderly after continuous task requirement (e.g., in transportation, medical care, and security), but also for understanding and managing fatigue symptoms in various aging-related diseases (e.g., cancer, dementia, Parkinson's disease, stroke, and traumatic brain injury). The project also has the potential to yield brain-based biomarkers of fatigue that may be used to predict individual responses to continuous task requirement as well as responses to light treatment for reducing fatigue and improving performance.

项目总结