The Research Partnership in Cognitive Aging, a public-private effort to promote the study of brain function with age, will award up to $28 million over five years to 17 research grants to examine the neural and behavioral profiles of healthy cognitive aging and explore interventions that may prevent, reduce or reverse cognitive decline in older people.
The partnership, led by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation (MBRF), is seeking ways to maintain cognitive health -- the ability to think, learn and remember -- into old age.
The basic research supported by these grants will focus on the molecular, cellular, physiological and behavioral aspects of healthy aging as well as the development and pilot testing of experimental, evidence-based interventions. The pilot studies of behavioral strategies may eventually lead to full-scale, randomized clinical trials.
The partnership is supported by NIA and the MBRF through the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), a nonprofit that seeks funding partners for a broad portfolio of groundbreaking programs and projects in support of biomedical research. Beyond primary support from the partnership, additional funding comes from NIH's Office of Dietary Supplements and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
"We have made great strides in understanding how the brain and cognitive function change with age, identifying a number of avenues to explore in developing candidate therapies for improved cognition. The challenge remains, however, to distinguish between the changes that come with normal aging and those that signal an unhealthy decline," said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D.
Hodes pointed out that emerging evidence suggests that certain interventions -- such as exercise, environmental enrichment, diet, social engagement, cognitive training and stress reduction -- should be studied more intensively to determine if they might prevent or reduce declines in cognitive health. "These grants will make it possible for researchers to further pursue basic research in this area and to devise interventions that could be experimentally tested for their ability to improve cognitive function in older people," he said.
A full listing of the 17 projects and their investigators appears below. A sampling of the research supported by the partnership includes: