糖心vlog

A 糖心vlog researcher has been awarded a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study sleep-related brain function in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease, a progressive disorder that affects memory and behavior in millions of Americans.

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Aaron Wilber will receive the grant, awarded through the NIH鈥檚 National Institute on Aging, over the course of the next five years.

鈥淥ne reason Alzheimer鈥檚 treatments have failed may be because it鈥檚 difficult to catch the disease before the brain has become too dysfunctional to recover,鈥� Wilber said. 鈥淭his grant is focused on identifying early changes in the brain, and we hope that looking earlier in the disease progression will yield new insight into approaches for detecting and treating Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. We are also looking at later timepoints since more is known about later brain changes in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease.鈥�

Wilber鈥檚 team 鈥� including research scientist Shawn Moseley and graduate students Sarah Danielle Benthem and Alina Stimmell, and co-senior investigator Benjamin Clark from the University of New Mexico 鈥� will assess the relationship between spatial learning and memory and the brain鈥檚 dynamics during sleep. Using mouse models, they will examine these dynamics within and across the hippocampus and parietal cortex, brain regions involved in spatial navigation learning and memory.

Getting lost, particularly in new surroundings, is typically among the early symptoms of Alzheimer鈥檚, which suggests the disease is affecting the brain鈥檚 navigation systems and its memory systems at this stage.

鈥淭his project will provide insight into the normal function of a circuit that is dysfunctional in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease and allow us to probe dysfunction in this circuit that emerges in early stages of disease progression in mice modeling aspects of Alzheimer鈥檚 disease seen in humans,鈥� Wilber said. 鈥淭his research will allow us to begin understanding changes in this network which may underlie the emergence of cognitive impairments observed in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease and begin testing the efficacy of a non-invasive treatment for reversing functional brain abnormalities and impaired cognition.鈥�

Hippocampal-cortical interactions during sleep are thought to be critical for consolidation of newly acquired memories. Previous work in the Wilber laboratory has found deficits in the communication necessary for memory formation in the hippocampus and parietal cortex during sleep in mouse models of Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. This work was published last summer in the Journal Current Biology and offers insight into why memory is impaired in Alzheimer鈥檚 patients.

鈥淭he prevailing theory is sleep is critical for memory, and that the brain builds connections better while we are sleeping,鈥� Wilber said. 鈥淲hen you sleep, your brain plays back memories at high speed, usually six to seven times faster than they occurred in real life. If you鈥檝e fallen asleep dreaming and it feels like a significant amount of time has passed when you wake up, this high-speed playback during sleep may explain why. That high-speed playback is thought to optimize your brain cells for building better connections.鈥�

Researchers are now attempting to rescue these deficits using a novel stimulation method that has been shown to clear amyloid beta and tau, which accumulate in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease.

鈥淭his is an intriguing potential treatment for Alzheimer鈥檚 disease that could be translated into human patients, and I鈥檓 excited to further our understanding of the mechanisms underlying Alzheimer鈥檚 disease and studying new treatments for this devastating illness,鈥� Benthem said.

According to the National Institute on Aging, Alzheimer鈥檚 disease currently ranks as the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S., and the Alzheimer鈥檚 Association counts more than 6 million Americans currently living with the disease. Forty-seven million people worldwide are living with the disease, a number projected to soar to 76 million over the next decade.