Physical health determinants of cognitive ageing
SBI contributors
Project description
This package of work aims to clarify the role of physical health and health behaviors in cognitive and brain ageing. Key systemic health risk factors for dementia include cardiovascular and metabolic health. Specifically, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and hyperlipidemia are linked to both poorer brain health and greater risk of cognitive decline. Modifiable behaviors linked to these conditions include insufficient physical activity (PA), smoking, poor diet, and alcohol consumption.
In our recent neuroimaging work using advanced quantitative MRI, we have shown that greater adiposity, measured as combined BMI and waist circumference, was associated with lower levels of myelin in above-average healthy individuals. Importantly, this association was not explained or attenuated by PA. In addition, we showed that myelin content mediates the effect of age on memory in aging, and that all the behavioral and health risk factors mentioned above accelerate longitudinal decline in the brain’s white matter.
The future work using SHARE-HCAP data will extend these neurobiological findings to population studies to understand the individual and combined effects of systemic health and health behaviors on within-person changes in cognitive function in different socioeconomic and environmental settings, with the aim to provide context-specific guidelines for preventing or delaying onset of cognitive impairment.
Status
Active
Selected publications
Burzynska, A. Z., Anderson, C., Arciniegas, D. B., Calhoun, V., Choi, I. Y., Colmenares, A. M., Hiner, G., Kramer, A. F., Li, K., Lee, J., Lee, P., Oh, S. H., Umland, S., & Thomas, M. L. (2023). Metabolic syndrome and adiposity: Risk factors for decreased myelin in cognitively healthy adults. Cerebral circulation – cognition and behavior, 5, 100180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cccb.2023.100180
Burzynska, A. Z., Anderson, C., Arciniegas, D. B., Calhoun, V., Choi, I. Y., Mendez Colmenares, A., Kramer, A. F., Li, K., Lee, J., Lee, P., & Thomas, M. L. (2024). Correlates of axonal content in healthy adult span: Age, sex, myelin, and metabolic health. Cerebral circulation – cognition and behavior, 6, 100203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cccb.2024.100203
Mendez Colmenares, A., Thomas, M. L., Anderson, C., Arciniegas, D. B., Calhoun, V., Choi, I. Y., Kramer, A. F., Li, K., Lee, J., Lee, P., & Burzynska, A. Z. (2024). Testing the structural disconnection hypothesis: Myelin content correlates with memory in healthy aging. Neurobiology of aging, 141, 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2024.05.013
Mendez Colmenares, A., Prytherch, B., Thomas, M. L., & Burzynska, A. Z. (2023). Within-person changes in the aging white matter microstructure and their modifiers: A meta-analysis and systematic review of longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging studies. Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), 1, imag-1-00045. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00045