The Metabolic Link Metabolic Interventions For Cognitive Resilience in Aging | Abbi Hernandez, PhD | The Metabolic Link Ep. 23
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Sep 13, 2023 AI Snips
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Hippocampus Is Metabolically Vulnerable
- The hippocampus is critical for learning, memory, and emotional regulation and is especially vulnerable to age-related decline.
- Long-range projection neurons in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are metabolically costly and decline first when glucose utilization worsens with age.
Make Rodent Tests Human-Relevant
- Design rodent cognitive tasks to map onto human-relevant behaviors and motivations rather than simply copying human tasks.
- Use spatial navigation, working memory, and object-location association to model hippocampal-prefrontal function translatable to humans.
Layer Tests To Reveal Anxiety Effects
- Combining anxiety-provoking features with cognitive tasks reveals how emotional state affects cognition across ages.
- Layering tests (open vs closed arms with a cognitive maze) exposes age-related anxiety impacts on task performance.