Ageing Deftly: How Lifestyle And Context Transform Neurocognitive Ageing

巧妙地衰老：生活方式和环境如何改变神经认知衰老

• 批准号: RGPIN-2022-04872
• 负责人: Anderson, John
• 金额: $ 1.89万
• 依托单位: Carleton University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=749547
• 关键词: Ageing; Deftly; How; Lifestyle; Context

The ratio of Canadians older than 60 is rising. By 2050, they will comprise 41% of Canada's population. With these increased numbers of seniors come many comorbid health issues, including Alzheimer's dementia (A.D.). While there has been progress towards drug therapies for A.D., the effectiveness of these approaches is limited. While the drug industry catches up, researchers must explore alternatives for maintaining cognitive function and resisting dementia, to mitigate rising mental and physical health care costs for the A.D. and improve patient and family members quality of life. There are two promising approaches for improving older adults' cognitive function without new drug therapies. First, long-term experiential factors can slow cognitive decline, increasing resistance to Alzheimer's symptoms, allowing extended periods of independence. Such patients may have A.D. pathology postmortem but never display signs. Protective factors contributing to cognitive reserve (C.R.) include exercise, education, and bilingualism. For example, bilinguals are diagnosed with dementia 4.5 years later than monolinguals, yet brain scans of bilingual and monolingual Alzheimer's patients matched for symptoms show higher atrophy in bilingual brains. Thus, bilinguals endure more profound neuropathology before Alzheimer's symptoms appear. Second, environmental/contextual factors dynamically shape cognition. These factors include momentary changes in alertness due to fatigue, caffeine, mood, and individual differences in circadian rhythms and testing time. Asking individuals to perform demanding executive function tasks at their circadian peak (optimal time of day) improves cognitive performance. By failing to account for these factors, researchers could introduce systematic bias: e.g., to maximize an apparent age effect, they might test all participants in the afternoon, which would benefit younger adults (18-35 Y) and penalize older adults (65-80 Y). My research pushes these approaches into new territory by showing that older adults doing a working memory task at their optimal time of day performed more like young adults and demonstrated, for the first time, that older adults recruited similar brain regions as younger adults. I will recruit 17 HQP (7 graduate and 10 undergraduate students) over 5 years to examine how contextual factors (time of day, caffeination, etc.) and lifelong experiential factors (exercise, bilingualism, education) collectively delay age-related cognitive decline across 2 major projects and 9 experiments. This research will generate new knowledge about how these factors interact to best predict older adults' cognitive wellness. Using behavioural and neuroimaging methods, I will examine older adults' cognitive control by studying the impact of contextual factors, cerebral lifestyle factors, lifestyle factors with a cardiovascular origin, to recommend ways of optimizing the cognitive potential of older adults across cultures and countries.

60岁以上的加拿大人比例正在上升。到2050年，他们将占加拿大人口的41%。随着老年人数量的增加，出现了许多共病的健康问题，包括阿尔茨海默氏痴呆症（AD）。虽然药物治疗AD取得了进展，这些方法的有效性是有限的。虽然制药业迎头赶上，但研究人员必须探索维持认知功能和抵抗痴呆症的替代方案，以减轻AD不断上升的精神和身体保健成本，并改善患者和家庭成员的生活质量。有两种有希望的方法可以在没有新药物治疗的情况下改善老年人的认知功能。首先，长期的经验因素可以减缓认知能力的下降，增加对阿尔茨海默氏症症状的抵抗力，允许延长独立时间。这类患者死后可能有AD病理学，但从未显示出迹象。认知储备（C.R.）的保护因素包括运动、教育和双语。例如，双语者比单语者晚4.5年被诊断出患有痴呆症，然而双语和单语阿尔茨海默病患者的大脑扫描显示双语大脑的萎缩程度更高。因此，在阿尔茨海默病症状出现之前，双语者会经历更深刻的神经病理学。第二，环境/背景因素动态地塑造认知。这些因素包括由于疲劳、咖啡因、情绪以及昼夜节律和测试时间的个体差异而引起的警觉性的瞬间变化。要求个人在他们的昼夜高峰（一天中的最佳时间）执行要求苛刻的执行功能任务可以提高认知能力。如果不考虑这些因素，研究人员可能会引入系统性偏见：例如，为了最大化明显的年龄效应，他们可能在下午测试所有参与者，这将有利于年轻人（18-35岁），不利于老年人（65-80岁）。我的研究将这些方法推向了新的领域，表明老年人在一天中的最佳时间进行工作记忆任务时表现得更像年轻人，并首次证明老年人与年轻人招募了类似的大脑区域。 我将在5年内招募17名HQP（7名研究生和10名本科生），以研究环境因素（一天中的时间，咖啡因摄入量等）和终身经验因素（运动，双语，教育）在2个主要项目和9个实验中共同延缓了与年龄相关的认知衰退。这项研究将产生关于这些因素如何相互作用的新知识，以最好地预测老年人的认知健康。使用行为和神经影像学方法，我将通过研究环境因素，大脑生活方式因素，心血管起源的生活方式因素的影响来检查老年人的认知控制，以推荐优化跨文化和国家老年人认知潜力的方法。