Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) have received a five-year, $3.7 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging to extend their study of brain aging with a 7T MR scanner.

The funding will allow psychology professors Dr. Kristen Kennedy and Dr. Karen Rodrigue to add two more phases to their longitudinal study, bringing the total to five rounds of data collection over 14 years, tracking changes in brain structure, function, and cognition in 180 participants ages 20 to 98.

The study, called the Dallas Area Longitudinal Lifespan Aging Study, will leverage the 7T scanner at the Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC), a joint facility with UT Southwestern Medical Center, UT Dallas and other North Texas institutions, to examine brain structures with submillimeter precision, providing insights into the biochemical environment of brain tissue.
With the high-resolution imaging, Kennedy and Rodrigue aim to explore metabolic factors, such as antioxidants and neuroinflammation, that might differentiate healthy brain aging from pathological trajectories, including Alzheimer’s disease. “The next two sets of data will add novel information about the metabolic factors that may determine if a person’s brain-aging trajectory is healthy or not,” said Rodrigue, who is the director of CVL’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging Lab.

The study will examine three levels of aging: cellular and molecular, tissue-level, and macroscopic brain changes, each offering a new layer of data on how the brain ages. The 7T scanner will allow researchers to measure myelin content, cortical thickness, and neurometabolite levels, including key antioxidants and neurotransmitters.

“This opportunity to bridge gaps in knowledge between fields and across spatial scales is immensely exciting,” Kennedy said.

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