U.S. Asian populations may have different risk profiles for common geriatric conditions like cognitive and physical decline

Newswise, July 10, 2017– U.S. Asian populations may have different risk profiles for common geriatric conditions like cognitive and physical decline. Researchers from the PINE study—the first ever longitudinal study of U.S. Chinese older adults in the greater Chicago area—found the cognitive and physical function of U.S. Chinese immigrants may be greatly impacted by their social and cultural context more than non-immigrant populations, according to three studies published in the special issue of the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

Each of the three studies focused on different components of geriatric syndromes: physical function decline, cognitive decline, and the relationship between social support and cognitive function.

The PINE Study from Rush University Medical Center was initiated in 2011 with over 3,000 U.S. Chinese older adults, who were surveyed 2 years after their first interview.

The status of physical function and cognitive function was examined, and profiles of socio-demographic characteristics were collected at each visit. In total, these studies provide an in-depth understanding of U.S. Chinese older adults and their health and present the need for more in-depth studies into the health of U.S. Asian communities to further efforts toward health equity.

Contrary to existing research, the PINE Study showed mixed findings regarding the effect of socioeconomic status on functional decline over time.

 Researchers had previously theorized that lower education and income were risk factors for rapid functional decline, but the PINE Study showed that only lower education was associated with worse physical function, and these effects diminished over time. Income was not related to physical performance or rate of decline in age.

“Our findings showed the unique characteristics of Chinese older immigrants. For example, lower income is usually associated with faster rate of physical performance decline in other populations, but we did not find a significant relationship in the U.S. Chinese aging population,” said Dr. XinQi Dong, MD, MPH, professor of Rush University Medical Center, and the principal investigator of the PINE study.

“In our population, individual income may not fully capture an individual’s socioeconomic status. There is also significant socioeconomic variability within the category of Asian Americans, contrary to the Model Minority conception, which may obfuscate the association between socioeconomic status and physical function decline.”

These findings regarding the complexities of the U.S. Chinese population were reflected in a study regarding cognitive function trajectory among Chinese older adults. Dr. Lydia Li, PhD, Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Michigan, found that the change of different cognitive abilities, which represent components of cognitive function, varies greatly between individuals. For example, more highly educated individuals have clear advantages in all types of cognitive abilities at baseline, they have more decline in episodic and global memory in two years.

Further, men performed better than women in most cognitive abilities at baseline but had faster rates of decline in working memory.

“The sex differences in baseline and the change of cognition over a two-year period may be explained by a recent study indicating that older women are more resilient than their male counterparts in cognitive decline. However, they found women to perform better in some cognitive domains at baseline, and that study was based on a sample of primarily White adults with higher level of education,” Li continued.

“It may be gender inequality in Chinese society that renders older women at disadvantages in cognitive testing.”

Building on the idea that Chinese culture and context may influence cognitive status in late life, the PINE Study researchers also found that social relationships, in the form of both more social support and more social strain, were associated with better cognitive function.

“We were surprised that social strain was positively associated with cognitive function. This is not common in other populations. Social support and social strain are important facets in older adults' social life,” said Shaoqing Ge, MPH, PhD candidate at Duke University School of Nursing.

The reason, Ge noted, may be culturally-based: “this finding may be the result of the unique appraisals among Chinese older adults. Reporting higher social strain may reflect a more socially engaged lifestyle.

Influenced by the traditional Chinese culture and norm, the U.S. Chinese older adults view their active engagement in the family as indications of self-value. Consequently, U.S. Chinese older adults may interpret social strain in a positive way.”

These articles are part of a special issue in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences to be fully released in July, 2017. Electronic version can be accessed through JGMS website.

For more information about the PINE study, please visit the PINE Study Wikipedia page or our website.

Why the ‘Peculiar’ Stands Out in Our Memory Ohio State professor speaks on the neuroscience of remembering

Newswise, June 27, 2017 – Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit in with a lot of other things we remember – but have a slightly weird twist.

 It’s this notion of ‘peculiarity’ that can help us understand what makes lasting memories, according to Per Sederberg, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

 “You have to build a memory on the scaffolding of what you already know, but then you have to violate the expectations somewhat. It has to be a little bit weird,” Sederberg said.

 Sederberg talked about the neuroscience of memory as an invited speaker at the prestigious Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in France on June 19. He spoke at the session “What are memories made of? Stirring emotions and last impressions” along with several advertising professionals and artists.

 Sederberg has spent his career studying memory. In one of his most notable studies, he had college students wear a smartphone around their neck with an app that took random photos for a month. Later, the participants relived memories related to those photos in an fMRI scanner so that Sederberg and his colleagues could see where and how the brain stored the time and place of those memories.

 From his own research and that of others, Sederberg has ideas on which memories stick with us and which ones fade over time.

 The way to create a long-lasting memory is to form an association with other memories, he said.

 “If we want to be able to retrieve a memory later, you want to build a rich web.  It should connect to other memories in multiple ways, so there are many ways for our mind to get back to it.”

 A memory of a lifetime is like a big city, with many roads that lead there.  We forget memories that are desert towns, with only one road in. “You want to have a lot of different ways to get to any individual memory,” Sederberg said.

 The difficulty is how to best navigate the push and pull between novelty and familiarity. Novelty tells us what is important to remember. On the other hand, familiarity tells us what we can ignore, but helps us retrieve information later, Sederberg said.

 Too much novelty, and you have no way to place it in your cognitive map, but too much familiarity and the information is similarly lost.

 What that means is that context and prediction play critical roles in shaping our perception and memory. The most memorable experiences are those that arise in a familiar and stable context, yet violate some aspect of what we predict would occur in that context, he said.

 “Those peculiar experiences are the things that stand out, that make a more lasting memory.”

 Sederberg’s co-presenters, all based in London, are Dominique Bonnafoux, a senior strategist at FITCH; Mike Reed, founder and creative director of Reed Words; and Jason Bruges, a multidisciplinary artist and designer.

Brain Stimulation Used Like a Scalpel to Improve Memory

Precise memory is enhanced with targeted non-invasive brain stimulation

Newswise, February 15, 2017 — CHICAGO - Northwestern Medicine scientists showed for the first time that non-invasive brain stimulation can be used like a scalpel, rather than like a hammer, to cause a specific improvement in precise memory.

Precise memory, rather than general memory, is critical for knowing details such as the specific color, shape and location of a building you are looking for, rather than simply knowing the part of town it’s in.

This type of memory is crucial for normal functioning, and it is often lost in people with serious memory disorders.

“We show that it is possible to target the portion of the brain responsible for this type of memory and to improve it,” said lead author Joel Voss, assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“People with brain injuries have problems with precise memory as do individuals with dementia, and so our findings could be useful in developing new treatments for these conditions.”

Red highlights the "core" of the memory network. " Blue indicates where electromagnetic pulses were applied.

By stimulating the brain network responsible for spatial memory with powerful electromagnets, scientists improved the precision of people's memory for identifying locations.

This benefit lasted a full 24 hours after receiving stimulation and corresponded to changes in brain activity.

“We improved people’s memory in a very specific and important way a full day after we stimulated their brains,” Voss said.

The paper was published Jan. 19 in Current Biology.

The research enhances scientific understanding of how memory can be improved using noninvasive stimulation. Most previous studies of noninvasive brain stimulation have found only very general and short-lived effects on thinking abilities, rather than highly specific and long-lasting effects on an ability such as precise memory.

The memory test that showed improvements due to stimulation. 

Subjects studied ~100 objects, each at specific screen location, and were tested for their ability to recall these locations after a delay.The scientists used MRI to identify memory-related brain networks then stimulated them with noninvasive electromagnetic stimulation. Detailed memory tests were used to show that this improved spatial precision memory, and EEG was used to show that these memory improvements corresponded to indicators of improved brain network function.

Other Northwestern authors include first author Aneesha S. Nilakantan, Donna J. Bridge, Elise P. Gagnon and Stephen A. VanHaerents.

The research was supported by grants P50-MH094263, R01-MH106512, and R01-MH111790 from the National Institute of Mental Health, T32-AG20506 from the National Institute on Aging and F32-NS087885 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, all of the National Institutes of Health.

Women’s Cognitive Decline Begins Earlier Than Previously Believed

 Newswise, February 15, 2017 — UCLA researchers have found that mental sharpness in women begins to decline as early as their 50s. The study, which followed the same group of healthy women for 10 years after menopause, found that their average decline in mental processing ability was 5 percent during the decade-long period.

Cognitive processing speed, which includes speed of perception and reaction, showed an average decline of around 1 percent every two years and verbal memory declined on average around 1 percent every five years.

Previous longitudinal studies in midlife women had failed to consistently detect these cognitive declines.

For this study, the researchers accounted for what are called “practice effects,” which is when repeat testing using the same tests in the same individuals influence the results.

Practice effects mask some effects of the menopause transition. In this way they were able to uncover evidence of declines in two domains of cognitive functioning — processing speed and verbal memory.

The researchers examined data on more than 2,000 healthy women enrolled in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, or SWAN, who were tested regularly over several years to measure cognitive changes. The women were in their 40s when they enrolled in 1996 and were followed every one to two years for a median period of 6.5 years.

Women in their 40s and 50s who find they are forgetting things more often or think they are slower to react may only be experiencing usual aging, analogous to gradual slowing of physical reaction time, running speed, metabolic rate, and other declines that we all experience in midlife.

The authors of the study were Arun Karlamangla, WeiJuan Han, MeiHua Huang and Gail Greendale of UCLA, and Margie Lachman of Brandeis University

The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

SWAN has grant support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH),  the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Nursing Research and the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health (Grants U01NR004061; U01AG012505, U01AG012535, U01AG012531, U01AG012539, U01AG012546, 01AG012553, U01AG012554, U01AG012495).