Description du projet
Identification des mécanismes de résilience face au vieillissement cognitif
Le vieillissement cognitif affecte des aspects tels que la mémoire, l’attention et la prise de décision, et conduit souvent à des conditions comme la maladie d’Alzheimer. Il existe sans aucun doute une variabilité interindividuelle en termes d’apparition de la neuropathologie, et connaître les facteurs déterminants permettra de concevoir des stratégies de réadaptation efficaces. L’objectif principal du projet AGEING PLASTICITY, financé par l’UE, consiste à identifier les marqueurs neurocognitifs du vieillissement en bonne santé. À cette fin, les chercheurs étudieront le réseau frontopariétal droit dans le cerveau et associeront des biomarqueurs spécifiques à des changements structurels. Considérant les millions de personnes atteintes de la maladie d’Alzheimer dans le monde, les résultats du projet contribueront à lutter contre le déclin cognitif.
Objectif
As global life-expectancy increases so do pathological age-related conditions impacting cognition. The worldwide prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease is expected to rise from 46 to 131.5 million affected people in the next 30 years, which will drastically compromise quality of life for many individuals and place a considerable economic burden on society. As acknowledged by the EU Commission, there is an imperative to ‘improve our understanding of the causes and mechanisms underlying…healthy ageing and disease. Older adults differ vastly in the extent to which their cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and decision making remain healthy. Highlighting sources of interindividual variability in this resilience to cognitive ageing, particularly in the face of neuropathology such as Alzheimer’s Disease will enhance the development of targeted neurorehabilitation interventions to prevent and redress cognitive decline. Several lines of work indirectly indicate the right fronto-parietal network (rFPN) in the brain, particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is critical for healthy cognition in ageing. This proposal will combine advanced cognitive neuroscience techniques to directly investigate whether neurocognitive markers of healthy ageing (i) relate to interindividual differences in white-matter (WM) structural organisation within the rFPN, and (ii) can be improved by upregulating activity within this network. This fellowship will be conducted at the Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology under the supervision of Prof Kia Nobre, world expert on the cognitive neuroscience of attention, and in close collaboration with Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg, leading authority on white matter plasticity at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN).
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
OX1 2JD Oxford
Royaume-Uni