NE Dallas News

Project Aims To Find Most Potent Roots of Aging Brain’s Ailments

Dr. Gagan Wig, a University of Texas at Dallas expert on the healthy and pathological aging of the brain, has received National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to develop animal models of the social factors that are believed to affect aging humans’ susceptibility to neurological diseases.

The pilot grant is from the Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging Research Network, which is directed by researchers at Duke University, the University of Minnesota Medical School and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through a grant from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging (R24AG065172).

Wig will focus on developing a mouse model of the progression of neurological disorganization in the aging brain so that he and his team can later isolate the specific variables that can modulate such conditions.

“We know that environmental and social factors contribute to age-related cognitive decline and brain disease, but it’s difficult to untangle in humans what the exact crucial exposures are,” said Wig, associate professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. “Links between social adversity, health and mortality exist in other social mammals, so there is an opportunity to learn about exposures via animal models.”

In his neuroimaging lab in UT Dallas’ Center for Vital Longevity, Wig studies socioeconomic factors that predict the risk to aging adults of developing neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“The absence of a college education seems to result in greater declines in brain health during older age, measured from an individual’s brain network organization,” he said. “But why? It’s certainly not just about the diploma, but likely because education often translates to job opportunities. Having a well-paying and secure job is a strong predictor of things such as access to nutritious food and health care, adequate sleep, time for exercise, and ways to navigate stressful life events. We think these things matter for an individual’s brain network organization, but we need to be able to study them more directly.”

Wig’s research in humans has examined the functional specialization of the brain network — a trademark of a healthy brain — and how specialization breaks down as people age.

“From the way in which different regions of the human brain are interconnected, we derive a sense of a modular organization, which allows different parts of the brain to be functionally specialized,” he said. “In humans, the modules become less distinct over time, and evidence suggests that this process has bad outcomes.”

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