Researchers awarded $2.7M to study loneliness and Alzheimer鈥檚
Work will tell us how loneliness interacts with brain structure and function in normal aging and pre-symptomatic Alzheimer鈥檚 disease
Two researchers from The Neuro, with collaborators from the StoP-AD Centre at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, will lead a research program centered on an emerging field of neuroscience thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Aging (NIH/NIA) in the USA.
The grant, expected to total $2.7M CAD ($2M USD) over five years, will fund a project led by Nathan Spreng and Danilo Bzdok to investigate the relationship between loneliness and brain structure/function in typically aging people and in people at risk for Alzheimer鈥檚 disease (AD).
It is known that feelings of loneliness in later life are associated with poor health outcomes, including loss of cognitive ability, greater dementia risk, and higher mortality rates. Yet there is a lot we do not know about how loneliness impacts the brain in older adults. Previous work from Spreng and Bzdok has demonstrated that the default network, an assembly of regions closely overlapping the 鈥榮ocial brain鈥�, is vulnerable to both loneliness and AD. This suggests that loneliness and neuropathological changes may interact to shape the course of brain aging and progression to AD.
The NIH/NIA-funded project will advance our understanding of this subject in two ways, making use of two large databases.
- The scientists will use the , currently the world鈥檚 largest open-access medical database, to develop pattern-learning models that compare aging in non-lonely individuals to aging in the brain of people who experience loneliness.
- The team will study people at potential risk for AD to determine how loneliness affects their brain structure and function, and how these effects might influence the progression of AD biomarkers. The data is collected as part of a continuing collaboration between Spreng and the ongoing PREVENT-AD project led by Judes Poirier and Sylvia Villeneuve at the .
With Spreng鈥檚 expertise in modelling the relationship between brain and cognitive changes in aging and AD, and Bzdok鈥檚 knowledge of tailoring machine learning algorithms to chart and extract insight from population-scale datasets, they form a highly complementary team to lead this exciting project.
鈥淭his funding support will be extremely valuable in advancing our understanding of how social isolation and feelings of loneliness impact the brain and cognitive functioning in older adults,鈥� says Spreng. 鈥淎nd these questions are becoming even more urgent in the context of the current pandemic.鈥�
鈥淲e are grateful to the National Institutes of Health in the USA to acknowledge the promise and potential of integrating big and deep biomedical data in driving progress at the intersection of social isolation and its manifestations in the brain,鈥� says Bzdok. 鈥淚n the current climate, it is more important than ever to explore how periods of social isolation can impact the progression of neurological disorders in general and Alzheimer鈥檚 disease in particular. Since we are all different, and each of us may experience moments of social deprivation differently, harnessing population cohorts from the broader society using state-of-the-art machine learning tools is a particular attractive avenue to go forward.鈥�
The funding was awarded under NIH grant number R01AG068563
