Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The number of Canadian older adults is expected to rise; cost to the health care system due to declining mental function (cognition) of older adults will also increase. Strategies that maintain and improve cognition include aerobic training (i.e. biking), which is the most promising so far, although training cognition also shows positive improvements. Finding strategies that improve cognition is important, but why these enhancements occur is necessary, as it would allow researchers to improve strategies in the future to increase effectiveness. One way to observe why changes are occurring is to measure brain functioning, before and after interventions; brain imaging can do this. Here, we propose an advanced imaging method to look at the functioning of the brain, that would allow us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how improved brain functioning leads to improvements in cognition in older adults. Specifically, to compare and contrast what occurs in the brain after aerobic or cognitive training in healthy older adults. A separate study in this project will investigate the same question, but in older adults already experiencing cognitive impairments, providing insight for if they experience changes to brain function and if so, whether the mechanisms for change are the same as in those without cognitive decline. This project will allow for an understanding of how aerobic and cognitive interventions change brain functioning to lead to improvements in cognition. Based on these findings researchers will be able to capitalize on these changes to develop interventions providing even more robust enhancements to cognition. These findings will also provide more evidence to use aerobic and cognitive training to prevent cognitive impairment and to improve it if it has already occurred, reducing burden to the health care system. Finally, these results could provide the framework to create public policies and guidelines to prevent and treat cognitive decline in older adults