Summary: A ten-year-long study of mental health has released its entire dataset, providing unique vertical insights into how consciousness and brain structure change as adults. The Dallas Lifespan Brain Study tracked almost 500 individuals from time 21 to 89 over three timepoints using brain scans, mental testing, and health assessments.
Findings reveal that mental decline is caused by a variety of neural pathways. Researchers around the world can now study the science of healthy aging and premature decline more thoroughly than ever before thanks to the open-access data.
Important Facts:
- Vertical Insight: This is unusual in brain aging study because it followed the same individuals for ten years.
- Comprehensive Information: Including health indicators, MRI, PET scans, mental testing, and detailed data.
- Open Access: The entire data is now available for international medical use and assumption tests.
Origin: UT Dallas
Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas’s Center for Vital Longevity ( CVL), a decade-long initiative that seeks to monitor brain and mental wellbeing as people time and identify neurologically good paths from those with a possibility of decline, have released the , complete dataset , from a decade-long project.
The , Dallas Lifespan Brain Study , ( DLBS ) combined brain and cognition measures across the adult lifetime, including an expansive range of imaging and tests at three points across 10 years in nearly 500 individual healthy peoples ‘ lives.
An article published on May 26 in , Nature’s Scientific Data , provides an overview of the project and outlines its importance, which includes data collected from 2008 to 2020.
The project was started by Dr. Denise Park, Distinguished University Chair in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and CVL’s Director of Research. She claimed that the mind could be thought of as an orchestra using, with various parts playing an important role in various stages of a composition.
” This store allows us to see the head all at once”, Park said.
Releasing this information will enable the study and description of how the brain changes over time in a variety of ways. You can learn one point from grey matter, another from light matter, and another from nerve stimulation.
Dr. Gagan Wig, co-corresponding author of the article and an associate professor of psychology in the , School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, said,” We have been using this data to analyze paths of aging across age, including end years, which has been understudied.
The DLBS has been able to identify individual traits that are predictive of cognitive decline and disease.
A Method to Extend Research in Time ( MERIT ) Award ( R37 ) from the National Institute on Aging ( NIA ), a division of the National Institutes of Health, was awarded to Park to launch the DLBS, which provided long-term funding, in this case for ten years.
That allowed the team to devote its time entirely to gathering data without the need to publish results within an early time frame.
464 of the initial 21 to 89 participants were surveyed by the DLBS, 338 of whom came back for a second assessment three to five years later, and 224 of whom had a similar period of data collection.
According to Wig, “having three timepoints is uncommon among studies of brain aging across adulthood.”
” So often, studies of aging are based on cross-sectional comparisons of younger and older people, not looking at the same individuals followed over time. Longitudinal testing is crucial to understanding how and why people get older in the way that they do.
A comprehensive neuropsychological battery, questionnaires assessing physical and neurological health, a range of imaging scans, including structural and functional MRIs, and measurements of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain using positron-emission tomography ( PET ) scans were included in each evaluation.
Wig praised the study’s inclusion of middle-aged participants, early adoption of brain scans that allowed for the measurement of brain networks, and the use of PET data from a cognitively normal sample as an innovative development.
Important findings made from the DLBS data include : descriptions of the presence of high levels of amyloid in healthy adults; and discoveries that have since been verified in further research.
Finding healthy adults who had amyloid was the first indication that amyloid might not be sufficient for cognitive impairment, according to Wig.
” Since then, some efforts to clear amyloid from the brain have been successful, but there have been mixed results in terms of deterring further cognitive decline.”
Researchers now hold the hypothesis that amyloid is a factor that causes tau tangles, another hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, to aggregate. Data from the most recent DLBS wave, which allows researchers to study the brain’s tau levels, is available.
” The availability of this valuable data is allowing scientists to evaluate and refine dominant models of disease and cognitive aging,” Wig said.
Park views cognitive decline as pieces in a puzzle that may not be the same for everyone.
Some people have highly degraded white matter that makes problems. Others have problems with activation or brain shrinkage. No two people are alike, she claimed.
We can’t identify any single pattern, we say. But we’re heading toward being able to understand why certain people are in decline, and we’re learning more about potential causes.”
Researchers around the world can test hypotheses about the brain and cognition throughout adulthood thanks to the open-access data.
Although the CVL and other scientists have already published a lot of research on this data, Park said that these researches only have made the most of what this research can reveal about the cognitive neuroscience of aging.
” The publication of our open repository will allow the data to be more broadly accessible in the neuroscience, medical and psychological communities.
The dataset also contains a large number of surveys and tools measuring specific health indicators, behavior and personality in people across adulthood, according to Wig.
Our team wants to work on improving this dataset as we look at individual trajectories of cognitive health for years, and we’re excited to help others do the same.
As Park approached her retirement this year, she faced an important choice: to devote several years to preparing the volumes of data to be shared with the world, or to focus on continuing to publish papers based on the data.
She said,” I figured out the best way to spend my time was to invest in this discipline by making the most of it.”
” We accomplished this in a manner that is very elegant, which is a lot of pride. The data is very easy for people to use if they come in with a hypothesis. That would make a bigger contribution to science, in my opinion.
Park expressed her hope that the repository will be able to provide the field of neuroscience with more questions to research and methods to explore them.
” I feel vindicated. I worked on this project for ten years of my career, and I was concerned that maybe I was trying to get something that wouldn’t turn out to be really important,” she said.
The data presented in this publication will continue to have an impact, and I’m confident that they will.
Other UT Dallas-affiliated authors include , psychology , professors , Dr. Kristen Kennedy , and , Dr. Karen Rodrigue, former CVL research scientist Dr. Joseph P. Hennessee, CVL research associate Evan T. Smith MS’15, PhD’21, and CVL research scientist , Micaela Chan , MS’12, PhD’16. Additional authors included those from Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Stony Brook University, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Grants from NIA 5R37AG-006265-27 and RC1AG036199 supported this work.
About this neuroscience and brain aging research news
Author: Stephen Fontenot
Source: UT Dallas
Contact: Stephen Fontenot – UT Dallas
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Open access to original research.
” A Comprehensive Adult Lifespan Data Set of Brain and Cognitive Aging is The Dallas Lifespan Brain Study.” by Denise Park et al. Scientific Information
Abstract
A Comprehensive Adult Lifespan Data Set of Brain and Cognitive Aging is The Dallas Lifespan Brain Study.
The Dallas Lifespan Brain Study ( DLBS ) was designed to integrate brain and cognition across the adult lifespan. Participants ( n = 464 ) were between the ages of 21 and 89 years old when they first received their data, and they returned about every 3. 5 to 5 years for a second ( n = 338 ) and third epoch ( n = 224 ) of data collection.
A comprehensive neuropsychological battery, questionnaires measuring physical health, psychosocial status, and brain health, structural MRI scans ( including T1-weighted and diffusion-weighted imaging ), a hypercapnia scan, an arterial spin labeling scan, and four functional fMRI scans were all present during the three epochs.
Additionally, measures of amyloid and tau were collected with AV-45 ( Florbetapir ) and AV-1451 ( Flortaucipir ). Important improvements included the inclusion of PET data for amyloid and tau in a cognitively normal sample and robust sampling of middle-aged participants.
This sizable dataset was just released on OpenNeuro. org open-access and provides the opportunity for researchers to test many hypotheses about brain and cognition across human adulthood, including longitudinal hypotheses, with these data across a multi-year span.
