Beth Snitz
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Understanding how the aging brain changes depends on careful, repeated measurement of older adults' thinking, health and daily function. This grant supports the Clinical Core of a larger research program on aging.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cognitive aging
older adults
neuropsychological testing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Recruit 300 older adults and conduct yearly neuropsychological testing, neurological exams, and assessments of function, behavior and mood, to support studies of cognitive aging.
- Assign each participant a cognitive diagnosis at biweekly multidisciplinary case conferences, using the full set of clinical and cognitive assessments.
- Measure vascular risk (arterial stiffness, carotid ultrasound, blood vessel lining function) and sleep (diary, wrist actigraphy, overnight polysomnography) at baseline, 24 and 48 months.
- Coordinate imaging, biofluid and autopsy data collection with partner cores, and merge clinical data with biomarker data for analysis.
More about the research
The Clinical Core recruits participants, evaluates them, and assigns each person a cognitive diagnosis, meaning a classification of their thinking and memory status. The program's other projects use these diagnoses to test their hypotheses.
Why it matters
Detailed, repeated records of thinking, mood, vascular health and sleep in older adults give researchers the foundation to study how these factors relate to brain changes with age. Linked to imaging, fluid biomarkers and autopsy findings, these data could help clarify the causes of cognitive decline in older people.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kaitlin B Casaletto
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Identify networks of more than 150 synaptic proteins in autopsied brain tissue from 869 Rush Memory and Aging Project participants that relate to cognitive resilience, meaning better thinking than brain pathology would predict.
David Geldmacher
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Enroll and follow about 525 community volunteers each year, cognitively unimpaired, with mild cognitive impairment or with mild dementia, at least 40% Black or African American, using standard national tests plus social determinants of health, body composition and actigraphy measures.
Caroline Hoyniak
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Identify which features of objectively measured sleep at age 3, captured by actigraphy and overnight polysomnography across both daytime naps and nighttime, correlate most strongly with early childhood depressive symptoms.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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