DALLAS – August 29, 2017 – A new CVL study is among the first to investigate how degraded connections in certain parts of the adult brain might affect one’s ability to perform the financial calculations that are vital to everyday life among older adults.

The results, published in the most recent issue of Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, relied on imaging the white matter connections within the brain and measuring how intact the connections are. Researchers found there is an association between the integrity of a person’s white matter – the tracts that allow communication between different brain regions – and the person’s ability to handle their finances.

“As we age, we tend to see a degradation of the connective fibers that wire the brain, much like a vacuum cleaner cord that has been run over too much with years of house-cleaning,” said Dr. Kristen Kennedy, the senior author on the paper. “The insulation of the cord gets worn and the electrical signal may not be conducted as well, or as rapidly. It’s a similar principle with conduction velocity across white matter brain connections.”

In collaboration with Drs. Dan Marson and Adam Gerstenecker at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where more than 100 healthy elderly, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) participants were studied, David Hoagey, a doctoral student in Dr. Kennedy’s lab, analyzed diffusion-tensor images of the brain and related the measures each individuals’ performance on a battery of measures that assessed a variety of financial skills across 20 tasks…