Cortical Microstructure & Aging (CM-Age)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Esther Kühn, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423633679

We live in an aging society: The German mean age is 46 years – 15 years above the international average – and a German citizen can currently expect to live for around 80 years. Age-related motor, sensory, and cognitive decline, however, start early, around the age of 40, and often progress rapidly. This combination leads to dramatically increasing numbers of people being dependent on external health care (currently 2.34 million people in Germany), which constitutes a major burden for current health care systems, and significantly reduces an individual’s quality-of-life. Because the number of affected elderly people is expected to double every 20 years due to demographic change, preserving sensorimotor and cognitive abilities in the elderly is one of the major challenges for current human neuroscience research. It is known from animal work that most neuronal mechanisms that are affected by age manifest at the level of cortical microstructure, and influence cortical functions at different hierarchical levels, such as cortical macrostructure, and behavioral phenotypes. Current neuroscience research that is conducted on human aging, however, often lacks a microstructural level of explanation due to missing technology, and/or missing methodological expertise needed to describe neuro-behavioral changes at a sub-millimeter scale (i.e., 1mm-100µm, also often referred to as mesoscale). This leads to a current lack of mechanistic knowledge transfer from insights gained in animal research to age-related changes in humans, and associated behavioral phenotypes. CM-Age will target this problem. CM-Age will apply novel imaging technology (i.e., 7 Tesla MRI) to integrate basic neuroscience research with behavioral phenotypes at the sensorimotor, cognitive, and phenomenological level to build coherent, mechanistic frameworks on age-related neuro-behavioral change. The definition of ‘mechanistic’ I follow here expects a transfer of basic neuroscientific regulatory mechanisms in primary sensory cortex at the micro- and mesoscale to more complex behavioral phenotypes at the motor, sensory, cognitive, and phenomenological level. CM-Age has the final goal to use gained insights to develop mechanistically grounded training paradigms to stop or reverse age-related loss-of-function.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants