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NEVRONOR-Nasjonal satsing på nevrovitenskap f

What happens in the cerebral cortex through the life-span? Intra-cortical myelination, genes and cognition in development, aging and disease

Tildelt: kr 2,6 mill.

Despite its huge impact on research in neuroscience, a major limitation of MR morphometry has been that little information is obtained about specific neurobiological mechanisms. Cortical thinning is seen throughout adolescence, adulthood and in early Alzh eimer's disease (AD), but the underlying mechanisms differ and cannot easily be inferred from MR morphometry alone. If more information about changes in tissue characteristics related to the morphometric effects could be obtained by conventional MR scans, this would greatly enhance the utility of MR-based technology. The cortical thinning in development may be caused partly by ongoing myelination of small white matter (WM) fibres within and directly beneath the cerebral cortex, while it may be caused by a trophy in AD. This has been difficult to address with morphometric measures. We suggest measuring MR signal intensity within the cerebral cortex, and our hypothesis is that changes in the T1 weighted MR-signal in development and aging are related to chang es in intra-cortical myelination. We will use MR sequences that are sensitive to specific tissue contents (i.e. water, iron and fat) to try to separate changes that are likely related to intra-cortical myelination from changes that may be ascribed to othe r phenomena. Further, we will test whether genes (i.e. single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) involved in myelin structure, composition, development or maintenance are related to changes in the MR signal. Finally, we will test how changes in signal intens ity are related to changes in cognitive function in normal development and aging, as well as in a demented (AD) patient group. We will pool MR scans from different projects, reaching a total sample of 2600 participants cross-sectional and about 1000 longi tudinal. This will constitute one of the largest MR studies to date. A cross-disciplinary team from Norway, USA, UK and Sweden are gathered.

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NEVRONOR-Nasjonal satsing på nevrovitenskap f

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