Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-11-2020

Keywords

JMG

JAX Source

Front Cell Dev Biol 2020 Sep 11; 8:562662

Volume

8

First Page

562662

Last Page

562662

ISSN

2296-634X

PMID

33042997

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2020.562662

Grant

AG057914, AG054180, AG050357, BrightFocus Foundation

Abstract

Developing strategies to maintain cognitive health is critical to quality of life during aging. The basis of healthy cognitive aging is poorly understood; thus, it is difficult to predict who will have normal cognition later in life. Individuals may have higher baseline functioning (cognitive reserve) and others may maintain or even improve with age (cognitive resilience). Understanding the mechanisms underlying cognitive reserve and resilience may hold the key to new therapeutic strategies for maintaining cognitive health. However, reserve and resilience have been inconsistently defined in human studies. Additionally, our understanding of the molecular and cellular bases of these phenomena is poor, compounded by a lack of longitudinal molecular and cognitive data that fully capture the dynamic trajectories of cognitive aging. Here, we used a genetically diverse mouse population (B6-BXDs) to characterize individual differences in cognitive abilities in adulthood and investigate evidence of cognitive reserve and/or resilience in middle-aged mice. We tested cognitive function at two ages (6 months and 14 months) using y-maze and contextual fear conditioning. We observed heritable variation in performance on these traits (

Comments

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY)

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