A new study that analyzed the brains of 107 older people sheds light on the neurobiology of both healthy and diseases aging.
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In addition, the research revealed a surprising relationship between dementia and decreased quality of RNA–a key player in gene expression–in the more aged brain.
“One factor that is not always taken into account when studying gene expression in the aged brain is the quality of the genetic material itself,” says Miller. “This variable is not necessarily related to any specific pathology or disease, but these results highlight the importance of properly controlling for RNA quality when studying the aged brain and indicate that degradation of genetic material may be an underappreciated feature of neurodegeneration or dementia.”
All of the data underlying the research is part of the Aging, Dementia and TBI resource, freely available through the Allen Brain Atlas data portal. “We want to promote a model of systematic, collaborative, multidimensional study of the diseased brain and open access to data and tools to facilitate discovery across the entire basic and biomedical research community,” says Lein.
“We anticipate that this dataset and research model will inform and help shape future brain aging research to propel a deeper understanding of the mechanisms driving neurological disease for improved diagnostic approaches and effective therapeutic strategies,” says C. Dirk Keene, M.D., Ph.D., study co-author and Director of UW Medicine Neuropathology./.../
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