Cardiovascular risk factors, physical activity and healthy cognitive ageing

博士项目战略主题：该项目将研究心血管健康如何有助于健康的认知老化。它将使用统计技术开发模型，例如多变量数据驱动和假设生成的分析，这将允许将心血管健康的多种措施与身体活动，神经结构和功能以及认知表现的措施相结合。这项研究的一个关键和新颖的方面将是使用脑磁图（MEG）数据来探索神经功能如何随年龄变化。这将是一个重要的进步，因为MEG不受年龄相关的血管变化的限制，最近观察到这些变化混淆了衰老的功能磁共振成像研究（Tsvetanov等人，出版中）。该研究将利用剑桥老龄化和神经科学中心（Cam-CAN）基于人群的横断面队列中的现有数据，该队列约有700名年龄在18-87岁之间的参与者（Taylor et al，2017）。第一次分析可能是对Cam-CAN数据的两项先前研究的扩展。这些研究将心血管健康和体力活动分别与白色物质完整性联系起来（Fuhrmann等人，2019; Strommer等人，2020）。然而，目前还不清楚心血管健康与白色物质完整性之间的联系是否由身体活动介导。这个博士项目旨在扩大这些研究，包括更多的神经结构和功能的措施，以更好地了解健康老龄化中心血管，大脑健康和认知表现组成部分之间的复杂关系。

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.