[Music] [Applause] late one night when I was in high school here in San Diego the phone rang on the other end of the line was the Houston Police Department they were calling to let us know that my grandfather had dropped my grandmother off at a pizza restaurant at 3:00 in the morning he did this because he didn't recognize her and it was his method of removing a stranger from his house but the real underlying reason is because he had Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's is so prevalent that it's likely everyone has been impacted Ed in one way
or another as a friend a caregiver a family member scientists have spent decades studying Alzheimer's disease but there still isn't a cure The Limited options that exist for treatment help some symptoms just a small bit and only temporarily this is disappointing for sure but it's not all that surprising given that we still do not understand the biggest risk factor for getting Alzheimer's disease disease in the first place aging it's time for a new approach one that prioritizes an understanding of why aging is the single most significant risk factor for getting Alzheimer's Disease an approach that
recognizes that without a comprehensive understanding of normal healthy aging curing the diseases that arise because of it will remain elusive as a neuroscientist at the sulk Institute my colleagues and I have adopted this approach critical to our work is the fact that aging is inevitable it happens to everyone but thankfully cognitive decline doesn't and so before we can solve Alzheimer's disease we must first ask what biological differences determine whether someone ages with or without cognitive decline answering this question requires three things identifying the biological changes that occur with aging understanding how these changes are interconnected
and knowing the sequence in which these changes occur meeting these objectives requires a strategy that explores aging not as a single event but as the dynamic process that it is a process that unfolds over a lifetime but humans live for a long time and the immediate and growing concern of Alzheimer's disease means there's an urgent need for answerers ansers we can't afford to wait decades for these answers and so we're not waiting we are studying aging and maret monkeys [Music] a marmosets live just 10 to 12 years which means that we can study their entire
lifespan in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same work in humans and what we discover about maret aging is directly applicable to humans because Marmet and humans are both primates and so they have brains that are remarkably similar also marmosets are smart but we can't ask them questions because they can't talk so how do we know if they're experiencing cognitive decline well we taught our monkeys to use touchscreen computers and then we let them play video games but we're not talking about Super Mario Brothers the video games that we designed
for the marma are similar to the tests used to diagnose memory problems in people and so by tracking how well the marma sets perform on their video games we can measure how well their brains are functioning as they get older on the screen you can see Triscuit getting ready to play a video game that measures his memory you can play along with him after he starts the game by touching the blue square the goal is to identify each new object as it's added to the screen love it [Laughter] [Applause] now similar to what's found in
people some of our marma sets are continuing to perform really well on their video games as they get older and they demonstrate cognitive resilience but other marma sets are starting to struggle on their video games and they're starting to show some cognitive decline this has let us start to explore what biological differences explain C itive resilience versus cognitive decline one of the biggest Clues we have is the fact that the brain uses a whopping 20% of the energy the entire body requires even though it makes up just 2% of the body's weight what does the
brain need all of that energy for well most of it goes into helping brain cells called neurons talk to each other this communication between neurons is a critical part of the way our brains work to help us think and reason and solve problems when neurons communicate they send information across tiny gaps between them called synapses the larger the synapse the more information can be sent but the more energy it takes to do so energy for communication between neurons is made by parts of cells called mitochondria that act as Tiny power plants and they come in
different sizes with larger ones producing more energy than smaller for seamless communication between neurons the size of mitochondria must match what the synapse needs in other words energy Supply must equal demand this means that mitochondria need to be the right size for the synapse they're working with and this is exactly what we see in the brain of an aged maret with cognitive resilience the Matched sizes of mitochondria and synapses mean there's a match between energy supply and demand this leads to seamless communication between neurons which is critical for good cognitive functioning in contrast in the
brain of an aged Marmet with cognitive decline the sizes of mitochondria and synapses do not align this means that there's a mismatch between energy supply and demand which disrupts communication between neurons and when neurons can't communicate cognitive decline sets in this discovery has opened an ENT entirely new way of thinking about cognitive decline with age it didn't come from studying Alzheimer's disease directly but by seeking to understand its biggest risk factor aging and as is the way in science answering one question begs several more that have shaped our ongoing research directions we recognize that the
brain is not operating in isolation it is part of an entire body undergoing the process of aging and so we're exploring what else we can learn about aging by studying things like blood and fecal samples from the very same marma sets whose video game performance were tracking we are confident that our approach will lead to novel insight into why some people age with cognitive resilience and others age with cognitive decline and with new understanding about aging doors will be opened for groundbreaking treatments for diseases that arise because of it like Alzheimer's I Envision a future
where cognitive resilience is just as inevitable as aging thank you
