Resilience to Alzheimer's Disease pathology

Cognitive resilience refers to the capacity to maintain high cognition despite neuropathological burden. It reflects the level of brain resilience against adverse conditions, such as aging, injury, or diseases that may increase the risk of cognitive impairments. The notion of cognitive resilience came from the observation that some individuals without cognitive impairments or clinical dementia were observed post-mortem to have substantial neuropathological burdens. This suggests that certain individuals may be able to offset the clinical manifestation of neural deterioration with a buffer against cognitive decline. Therefore, rather than focusing solely on risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia, an important area of research is to identify factors that actively contribute to cognitive resilience. Determining which factors drive cognitive resilience, will inform new prevention strategies and novel targets to help delay the onset of dementia, thus contributing to the over-arching goal of reducing the burden of dementia. This project uses unique longitudinal data on over 12,000 older individuals with plasma dementia biomarkers and detailed cognitive assessments and dementia diagnosis collected over 10+ years.