As the life expectancy continues to increase, the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) becomes a big major issue in the world. After cellular activation upon systemic inflammation, microglia, the resident immune cells in the brain, start to release proinflammatory mediators to trigger neuroinflammation. We have found that chronic systemic inflammatory challenges induce dif...

Introduction: Aging of the population is an issue of great public health significance. Forecasts indicate that the number of Americans 65 years of age and older will increase from 39 million in 2008 to between 99 million and 108 million by 2050 [1]. The population aged 85 years or older is projected to rise from 5.4 million in 2008 to between 25 million and 35 million by 2050 [1]. These changes...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study is to examine the cognitive function change related to aging, the incidence of cognitive impairment, and the association between apolipoprotein E polymorphism and cognitive impairment through a follow-up of the elderly with normal cognitive ability at baseline. METHODS Two hundred and fifteen subjects aged 65 and over were surveyed in February, 1998 (baseline ...

Aging is associated with well-recognized alterations in brain function, some of which are reflected in cognitive decline. While less appreciated, there is also considerable evidence of socioemotional changes later in life, some of which are beneficial. In this review, we examine age-related changes and individual differences in four neuroendocrine systems-cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, and o...

OBJECTIVES We examined the influence of postretirement leisure activity on longitudinal associations between work complexity in main lifetime occupation and trajectories of cognitive change before and after retirement. METHODS Information on complexity of work with data, people, and things, leisure activity participation in older adulthood, and four cognitive factors (verbal, spatial, memory,...

Age-related deficits in context processing were examined in relationship to two predominant theories of cognitive aging (the Inhibitory Deficit and Processing Speed Models). Older and younger adults completed a measure of context processing (AX-CPT task) as well as a computerized battery of inhibitory tasks: Stroop, garden path sentences, go no-go, and the stopsignal paradigm. Participants also...

Altered neuronal calcium homeostasis is widely hypothesized to underlie cognitive deficits in normal aging subjects, but the mechanisms that underlie this change are unknown, possibly due to a paucity of direct measurements from aging neurons. Using CCD and two-photon calcium imaging techniques on CA1 pyramidal neurons from young and aged rats, we show that calcium influx across the plasma memb...

This review addresses the importance of animal models for understanding the effects of normal aging on the brain and cognitive functions. First, studies of laboratory animals can help to distinguish between healthy aging and pathological conditions that may contribute to cognitive decline late in life. Second, research on individual differences in aging, a theme of interest in studies of elderl...

Following Rowe and Kahn’s successful aging model, this study identified successful aging as a distinctive aging trajectory and examined gender differences in the aging process. Using the Health and Retirement Study data (2000-2008), this study applied group-based trajectory analysis to identify multiple aging trajectories in a sample of older Americans aged 65 and over (N=9,226). Six dimensions...

Understanding aging-related cognitive decline is of growing importance in aging societies, but relatively little is known about its neural substrates. Measures of white matter microstructure are known to correlate cross-sectionally with cognitive ability measures, but only a few small studies have tested for longitudinal relations among these variables. We tested whether there were coupled chan...