Summary: A new study may provide key insights into the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers report people with higher levels of amyloid beta showed less activity in brain areas associated with working memory when engaged in cognitively demanding tasks.

Source: UT Dallas.

Slightly elevated beta-amyloid levels in the brain are associated with increased activity in certain brain regions, according to a new study from the Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) at The University of Texas at Dallas.

But that increase in activity might not be such a positive thing. The results indicate that the brains of these individuals may be working harder or recruiting more cognitive resources to complete tasks than those with lower levels of beta-amyloid, the main component of amyloid plaques, the study authors said.

The new research, published in the journal NeuroImage, offers a window into when these increasing levels of beta-amyloid, widely known as a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, might reach tipping points in the brain when regions crucial to memory begin behaving differently. Such points might foreshadow important milestones in the disease process.

by Lance Murray • Sep 20, 2017

UNTHSC is exploring the disease’s effect on Mexican-Americans, while a UTD study shows how it can impact the ability to perform financial calculations.

Alzheimer’s disease is a vital area of investigation for health researchers across the nation, and two North Texas institutions are in the thick of probing the disease’s devastating effects.

Researchers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center have begun a study of Alzheimer’s effect on Mexican-Americans as an ethnic group, while the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas recently published research on how degraded connections within certain parts of the brain impact older adults’ ability to perform financial calculations…

DALLAS – August 31, 2017 – Dr. Kristen Kennedy’s Neuroimaging of Aging and Cognition lab is receiving more than $2.5 million in federal funding to complete a six-and-a-half-year study to better understand what individual factors influence brain structure, function, and cognition over time.

Approximately 180 people will be studied individually at three timepoints to track how each person is aging, and whether an individual’s aging trajectory is influenced by levels of dopamine. Perhaps most excitingly, says Dr. Kennedy, is the opportunity to utilize baseline genetic information to gauge the risk or protection provided by varying levels of the neurotransmitter, while charting each individual’s neurocognitive trajectory over several years…

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…

As people age, their muscles and joints often stiffen up, as do their brains. Dynamic modulation of brain activity—the activation and deactivation of networks in response to different cognitive challenges—diminishes with age and with Alzheimer’s disease, leading to poorer memory and other cognitive deficits. Now, a new study of healthy adults suggests that this happens faster in people who carry the apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) allele, the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset AD. The work, from Chris Foster, Karen Rodrigue, and Kristin Kennedy at the University of Texas at Dallas, appeared online June 26 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The APOE4 allele increases the risk of age-related memory loss, accumulation of Aβ and amyloid, and thinning of the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. APOE4 also affects brain function. Normally, when the brain is at rest, activity hums along in a distributed set of brain regions called the default mode network. When faced with a job to do, such as remembering a bit of information, the brain dials down activity in default areas, and reallocates brainpower to regions needed for the task at hand. Aging, AD, and APOE4 all disrupt the shift, resulting in less deactivation where needed and worse learning and memory…

Younger people efficiently engage brain processes necessary to perform a task, while at the same time “shut down” processes irrelevant to the task, according to new research from the Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) at UT Dallas.

In addition, this ability to modulate, or control, brain activity appears compromised in older adults, said Dr. Kristen Kennedy, assistant professor at the center and the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

“To use a car analogy, the ‘neuroflexibility’ involved in pressing on the gas to meet a cognitive task, while simultaneously tapping on the brakes on anything that doesn’t help you get to the finish line of a task at hand, is one of the neural phenomena we’ve singled out,” said Kennedy, who led the research published in the February issue of NeuroImage.

By tracking the patterns of “neuroflexibility” and how more flexibility generally correlates with better cognitive performance and vice versa, researchers may one day be able to develop a more precise diagnostic criterion for determining which middle-aged adults may be at risk of cognitive decline later in life.

The CVL findings were based on a study of 161 healthy adults ages 20 to 94 from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Participants were given a battery of neuropsychological tests before they were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures brain activity. While in the scanner, participants were then asked to perform a simple spatial distance judgment task that involved discerning whether a dot was to the left or right of a horizontal bar. A second task involved dots that were either very far from the horizontal line or increasingly near or far, representing various levels of difficulty…

DALLAS – August 8, 2015 – After raising $440,000 last summer, BvB Dallas, the annual young-professionals powder-puff football game, raised $475,000 and recruited a large roster of players, coaches and supporting participants to tackle Alzheimer’s Disease this season.

Based on a competitive application process, BvB picked two beneficiaries for the 2015 season: Baylor AT&T Memory Center and the Kennedy Lab at UT Dallas’ Center for Vital Longevity at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Each player and coach, clad in Pink (Team Blonde) and Blue (Team Brunette), raised at least $1,000 to be on the field for the night game held at the Cotton Bowl on Aug. 8.

The final score was 45-8, with the Brunettes dominating even before the half-time show, in which Dr. Kennedy and other members of CVL were presented with a symbolic check.