View clinical trials related to Aging.
Filter by:This project aims to build up the comprehensive database of geriatric medicine for local Taiwanese.
This study examines the association of variability in glucose values over a 10-day period with cognitive function and functional status among individuals with prediabetes, aged 50 or older.
There are few studies that already have validated specific raw accelerometer cut-points for people over 65 years old. The purpose of the present study is to validate raw accelerometer cut points for general people over 65 years old and specific raw accelerometer cut points based on the functional status of older adults over 65 years old. The study will be carried out with an observational approach. Participants will be divided into 4 groups. First of them will be made grouping all subjects and the rest divided according to their functional status. They will perform different-intensity physical activities while wearing accelerometers attached to their body and wearing a portable gas analyser too. Their intensity will be assessed based on their own Rest Metabolic Rate (RMR). Energy expenditure and accelerations will be matched and, based on that, sedentary behaviour, light physical activity and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity cut-points will be derived.
People with Parkinson's disease (pwPD) often present difficulty consolidating newly learned skills into long-term memory. Sleep facilitates motor memory consolidation in healthy adults, especially in combination with targeted memory reactivation (TMR). TMR works by adding associated sounds during learning that are replayed during sleep and thus reinforce the recently formed neural connections. Importantly, recent work suggested that consolidation during sleep may be preserved in pwPD, but robust findings are lacking and have not involved TMR. The objective of the present study is to address this imperative question by investigating the effect of napping on motor memory consolidation by experimentally manipulating exposure to sleep and TMR for the first time. Concretely, the investigators will first compare the effect of a 2-hour nap to that of a wake control period in pwPD and healthy age-matched controls. A validated motor sequence learning task will be used to test for behavioral markers of motor learning and polysomnography with electroencephalography (EEG) will be conducted to study the neural correlates of sleep-related motor learning effects. In a second experiment, the investigators will then test the effects of adding TMR during post-learning sleep, by comparing performance on two motor sequences of which only one is reactivated during post-learning napping using auditory TMR.
Physical Activity (PA) is recognized as the most effective method to prevent falls in the elderly. Yet despite there being a consensus now that Physical Activity (PA) is effective in practice, there remain many obstacles to participation and attendance resulting in Physical Activity (PA) approaches designed to prevent falls actually only benefiting a limited number of elderly subjects. Social marketing has already shown its utility in the construction of prevention programs.
Using gene therapy to express active telomerase (hTERT) in humans has the potential to treat many of the age related diseases, including Aging itself. This study will entail treating subjects with hTERT delivered via transduction using AAV. The goal is to extend the telomeres to prevent, delay, or even reverse Aging.
Women are at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Notably at menopause, some women experience a change in cognition. However, not all women experience negative effects of menopause on cognition. The cognitive changes that occur at menopause have not yet been connected to late life risk for pathological aging including AD. Thus, understanding the neurobiological factors related to individual differences in cognition at menopause is critical for understanding normal cognitive aging and for determining risk for pathological aging. The challenge in understanding the role of estrogen loss on the risk for AD is the long lag time between the hormonal changes at menopause and the clinical manifestations of AD. Thus, identifying how the hormone changes after menopause are related to AD risk will alter the risk calculus for postmenopausal women in the future. The novel study proposed here will examine an established AD-related neurotransmitter-based mechanism that may also underlie cognitive changes after menopause. The investigators propose that the change in the hormonal milieu at menopause interacts with the cholinergic system and other brain pathologies to influence a woman's risk for cognitive decline. Preclinical studies have shown that estrogen is necessary for normal cholinergic functioning and its withdrawal leads to cholinergic dysfunction and cognitive impairment. It is important to determine whether menopause-related cognitive changes correlate with both cholinergic functional integrity and established AD biomarkers that portend increased risk for late-life cognitive impairment or dementia. This study will examine brain functioning following cholinergic blockade to separate individuals into those who are able to compensate for the hormone change after menopause and those who are not. The investigators hypothesize women with poor compensation have increased sensitivity to cholinergic blockade by showing poor performance on a cognitive task, altered brain activation, and decreased basal forebrain cholinergic system (BFCS) volume. These cholinergic markers will be related to menopausal factors associated with poor cognition and biomarkers of AD. Specific Aim 1 is to examine cholinergic functional "integrity" by measuring working memory performance, functional brain activation, and BFCS structure in postmenopausal women. Specific Aim 2 will examine whether individual differences in menopause-relevant symptoms and known AD biomarkers are related to cognition and brain activation after anticholinergic challenge. The public health significance of this study is that it will identify individual difference factors that are associated with cognitive performance changes after menopause and their relationship to structural, functional, and biomarker evidence of risk for later life cognitive dysfunction. Knowledge of these factors will serve to advance personalized future risk-mitigation strategies for women including hormonal, medication, cognitive remediation, etc. that will be the subject of further research.
A key early event in cardiovascular disease development is endothelial dysfunction, characterized by impaired flow-mediated dilation. Regular aerobic exercise ameliorates endothelial dysfunction in healthy older men, but the data in healthy postmenopausal women are inconsistent with many studies showing no effect. The primary objective of this study is to examine sex differences in acute and chronic endothelial responses to exercise training in older men vs. postmenopausal women.
Investigation of the chronic effect of 12 week multivitamin supplementation on markers of everyday function in adults aged 70 and over.
The investigators are studying the impact of insulin resistance on the acceleration of brain aging and testing whether increased neuron insulin resistance can be counteracted by utilization of alternate metabolic pathways (e.g., ketones rather than glucose). This study has three Arms, which together provide synergistic data. For all three Arms, subjects are tested in a within-subjects design that consists of 2-3 testing sessions, 1-14 days apart, and counter-balanced for order. Impact of fuel (glucose in one session, ketones in the other) on brain metabolism and associated functioning is measured during each session. For Arms 1-2, the primary experimental measure is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is used to trace the self-organization of functional networks following changes in energy supply and demand. Arm 1 tests the impact of endogenous ketones produced by switching to a low carbohydrate diet, while Arm 2 tests the impact of exogenous ketones consumed as a nutritional supplement. For Arm 3, simultaneous magnetic resonance spectroscopy/positron-emission tomography (MR/PET) is used to quantify the impact of exogenous ketones on production of glutamate and GABA, key neurotransmitters. Subjects will be given the option to participate in more than one of the Arms, but doing so is not expected nor required. Prior to scans, subjects will receive a clinician-administered History and Physical (H&P), which includes vital signs, an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), and the comprehensive metabolic blood panel. These will be used to assess diabetes, kidney disease, and electrolytes. If subjects pass screening, they will be provided the option to participate in one or more Arms, which include neuroimaging. To provide a quantitative measure of time-varying metabolic activity throughout the scan, based upon quantitative models of glucose and ketone regulation, as well as to be able to implement safety stopping rules (see below), the investigators will obtain pin-prick blood samples three times: prior to the scan, following consumption of the glucose or ketone drink, and following completion of the scan. To assess effects of increased metabolic demand, the investigators measure brain response to cognitive load, transitioning from resting-state to spatial reasoning through a spatial navigation video task. To assess effects of increased metabolic supply, the investigators measure brain response to glucose or ketone bolus.