New project underway to find answers.
The Allen Institute for Brain Science has announced major updates to its online resources available at “brain-map.org” brain-map.org, including a new resource on Aging, Dementia and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in collaboration with UW Medicine researchers at the University of Washington, and Group Health. The resource is the first of its kind to collect and share a wide variety of data modalities on a large sample of aged brains, complete with mental health histories and clinical diagnoses.
“The power of this resource is its ability to look across such a large number of brains, as well as a large number of data types,” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “The resource combines traditional neuropathology with modern ‘omics’ approaches to enable researchers to understand the process of aging, look for molecular signatures of disease and identify hallmarks of brain injury.”
The study samples come from the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study, a longitudinal research effort led by Dr. Eric B. Larson and Dr. Paul K. Crane of the Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington to collect data on thousands of aging adults, including detailed information on their health histories and cognitive abilities. UW Medicine led efforts to collect post-mortem samples from 107 brains aged 79 to 102, with tissue collected from the parietal cortex, temporal cortex, hippocampus and cortical white matter.