NIHA Virtual Seminar: Friday 2 June at 12pm

Join us for NIHA's June Virtual Seminar!

Taking place on Friday 2 June 2023 at 12pm, this month we have a presentation from Prof Rik Henson, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

Prof Henson will be giving a talk titled "Effects of mid-life activities and cardiovascular health on late-life cognition: clues from the CamCAN study"

The CamCAN cohort (www.cam-can.org) includes ~700 healthy adults aged 18-88 who kindly provided lifestyle, cognitive and neuroimaging (MRI+MEG) data. We have used these data to make many inferences about how age affects the relationship between various cognitive abilities and brain structure, function and connectivity. In this talk however, I will focus on preliminary attempts to relate lifestyle and cardiovascular health to cognition. One cognitive ability that declines rapidly with age is fluid intelligence. Using retrospective questionnaires, we found that mid-life activities (MAs) outside the workplace made a unique contribution to fluid intelligence in later-life (i.e., several decades later), above current age and education. Furthermore, these MAs moderated the relationship between brain structural health and fluid intelligence, conforming to a type of “cognitive reserve”. More recently, we have tried to identify the functional brain correlate of these MAs, such as degree of functional segregation of large-scale networks, but not yet succeeded. In parallel work, we have examined the relationship between fluid intelligence and cardiovascular latent variables extracted from blood pressure, mean and variability of heart-rate and BMI. It appears that pulse pressure is a critical factor, and that integrity of white-matter mediates the effect of pulse pressure on fluid intelligence (after adjusting for age). However many questions remain, e.g, concerning types of MAs, their effects on pulse pressure, and their (potentially delayed) effects on brain and cognition

The event is being run online via Zoom and is open to all. If you'd like to join us, use the link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84384109451

If you have any questions, please do get in touch via NIHA@uea.ac.uk.