Mechanisms of the relationship between ageing and dementia.

As our population ages, the burden of dementia is growing. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia; currently we do not have any disease-modifying treatments for AD. There is motivation to better understand the mechanisms of AD development and expression to control the burden of disease.

Frailty is related to neuropathological features of AD (i.e. plaques and tangles) and clinical dementia. Frailty and AD-type dementia share many risk factors and clinical features. We aim to to understand the relationship between neuropathological changes in AD and dementia expression, by taking frailty into account.

To accomplish this, we will examine how the relationship between traditional AD neuropathology and cognition differs over levels of frailty, investigate whether combining neuropathological markers could improve our understanding of this relationship, and observe how cognition and frailty change over time in relation to each other and neuropathology.
This approach creates opportunity for new prevention and treatment of dementia.

Faculty Supervisor:

Kenneth Rockwood

Student:

Lindsay Wallace

Partner:

University of Cambridge

Discipline:

Medicine

Sector:

Medical devices

University:

Program: