Grant: Project Grant

Over the next 20 years, Canada's senior population is expected to grow by 68%. To overcome this fast-growing crisis, the Government of Canada has developed a national dementia strategy that identifies cognitive health as a critical goal in health care. Although age affects various aspects of cognition, memory decline is one of the most debilitating symptoms. In addition, age significantly increases the chance of several brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, that severely impair memory. People with these conditions have difficulty remembering daily events. This challenge significantly limits their activities and independence, lowering their quality of life. To develop an innovative strategy to treat these memory problems, we must improve our understanding of how the brain forms and recalls memories and how these processes fail with age and diseases. To recall past events, the brain needs to reactivate the activity patterns during those events. However, such reinstatement of memory traces is not trivial because it goes against the natural tendency of the brain to restructure the activity patterns continuously. We recently discovered that an area of the brain called the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) appears to optimize the state of the brain network for memory recall. This proposal is designed to extend this investigation by monitoring and manipulating brain activity in freely behaving mice. First, we will ask how LEC inputs modulate the stability of memory representations in three brain regions essential for memory recall. Second, we will investigate how the LEC modulates the flow of information to these brain regions during memory formation and recall. Insights gained from this research will help explain why memory is disrupted in elderly and Alzheimer's disease patients with degenerated LEC.