USU Professor Receives Funding From NIH

Utah State University associate professor Maria Norton of the Department of Family, Consumer and Human Development received $970,549 from the National Institutes of Health to study how cumulative stress may lead to Alzheimer’s Disease.

The three-year study, titled “Lifespan Stressors and Alzheimer’s Disease,” will examine the extent to which psychosocial factors, and their interaction with genetic factors, increase risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

 

Norton and USU colleagues JoAnn Tschanz and Chris Corcoran will work with Duke University, the University of Utah, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden to pursue this research.

 

“Through this study we hope to procure a better understanding of which psychosocial stressors affect Alzheimer’s Disease risk and whether depression moderates these associations,” Norton said. “Findings from this study may one day help clinicians more selectively target Alzheimer’s Disease prevention strategies to more vulnerable individuals, in hopes of catching symptoms decades before they might arise.”

 

Recent results of both animal and human studies have shown a negative cumulative effect of stressful experiences on the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in memory, and typically damaged by Alzheimer’s Disease. Physiological stress reactivity and recovery impacting the brain is the underlying biological mechanism that prompted Norton to thoroughly examine the entire lifespan for individual and cumulative stressors and their impact on the risk for Alzheimer’s Disease.

 

Norton’s new study will build on the 14 years of detailed cognitive evaluations collected by the Cache County Study on Memory Health and Aging (funded since 1994 by NIH to Duke University, a study for which Norton is also USU principal investigator). The new study will look at life experiences such as parental death in infancy and early childhood, death of a spouse or child, disability and care giving in old age. The study will evaluate whether psychosocial adversity, and the timing of its occurrence, significantly increases one’s risk for Alzheimer’s Disease or more rapid cognitive decline in late life.

 

Norton will also study whether a lifetime history of depression helps to distinguish individuals for whom psychosocial stress has an ever greater effect on Alzheimer’s Disease risk. Her study will also test whether individuals with genetic factors associated with greater Alzheimer’s Disease risk experience an even greater risk or an earlier onset age in the presence of a life history of significant cumulative stress burden. Finally, Norton will examine whether stressors experienced earlier in life, especially during early childhood, make an individual more vulnerable to the effects of stressful experiences in late life on risk for developing the disease.

 

Alzheimer’s Disease is a major public health problem, one that is expected to affect approximately 6.5 million Americans by the year 2025 and as many as 13.4 million by the year 2050.

 

“Cache Valley is already making a major contribution to the field of Alzheimer’s Disease research,” Norton said. “The Cache County Memory Study is one of very few such large-scale population-based studies in the world. Thanks to the unprecedented level of participation of its generous citizens (90 percent of the county’s older adults joined the study), top scientists on the research team have published more than 66 journal articles reporting findings across a broad range of topical areas, primarily biological.”

 

Through Norton’s study, the Memory Study’s legacy continues to grow, she said, now with a focus on the psychosocial experiences of life.

 

“If it turns out that the stress we experience plays as large a role in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease as genetic and other environmental factors, the results may inform future interventions to help individuals cope better with stress,” Norton said. “The ultimate goal of this study is to substantially decrease the proportion of the population who will ever have to suffer from this debilitating disease currently affecting millions of individuals and their families. With the aging of the Baby Boomers, this has become an urgent public health priority.”

 

 

Contact: Maria Norton (435) 797-0613, maria.norton@usu.edu
Writer: Greg Boyles, greg.boyles@aggiemail.usu.edu