Project Title: The Links Between Vascular Health and Cognitive Ageing.

Supervisor: Dr Kamen Tsvetanov

Project Summary:

My research investigates how cardiovascular risk factors contribute to healthy cognitive ageing. The world’s population is rapidly ageing and older individuals typically experience steep declines in cognition. There are no effective treatments, therefore it is important to develop preventative approaches and to understand what enables some individuals to maintain cognitive performance into old age. The neural structures and functional connectivity that underpin cognition are modulated by vascular health. Vascular risk factors include blood pressure, heart rate and BMI. It is not clear whether individual vascular factors induce cognitive change through a single shared pathway or have independent effects. Most previous research combines multiple risk factors into a single composite score. Recent evidence indicates that multiple vascular factors make independent contributions to neuroanatomical ageing. Building on this, I hypothesize that multiple vascular factors are also independently associated with distinct aspects of cognitive ageing. I am investigating this by developing multivariate models that link vascular factors with multiple measures of neural structure and function, and cognitive performance. I use the cross-sectional cohort of the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), which has deep phenotype data on 700 participants, aged 18-88 years old. I aim to identify brain-wide signatures that underlie the relationships between multiple vascular risk factors and cognitive functions. The vascular factors identified in these analyses can potentially be modified with lifestyle changes such as physical activity, therefore the findings of my PhD work could inform public policies to enable healthy cognitive ageing.