An estimated 76,000 Oklahomans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, a number that has surged by 13% in just five years. Yet, despite the increasing need for effective treatments, therapies for age-related dementia have largely failed to slow or halt the disease’s progression.
Now, a University of Oklahoma researcher, backed by $2.2 million in federal funding, is leading efforts to unravel the mysteries of cognitive decline in aging – potentially opening the door to new, life-changing medications in the process.
Most treatments for Alzheimer’s use antibodies to target a pathogenic protein that gets deposited in the brain, but that approach is too late in the game. Once you’ve lost neurons to disease progression, you can’t get them back.”
Sreemathi Logan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Physiology, OU College of Medicine
“Our work aims to provide alternate strategies for identifying and targeting Alzheimer’s and other cognitive impairments,” she said.
Aging is the greatest risk factor for dementia, but the mechanisms linking aging to cognition decline are largely unknown. To gain insights into how this process works, Logan is studying molecular variations in the brains of older mice that may be translated to humans.
Logan and colleagues at the Oklahoma Center for Geroscience and Healthy Brain Aging developed a nocturnal testing model to assess an animal’s ability to relearn a simple task.
By using a specially designed cage, the researchers could observe how mice behave in a motivated learning and memory task through a four-night experiment. While younger