Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

An expanding aging population involves new health challenges. Life expectancy has grown significantly in many countries, but, in many cases the elderly people spend many years of cognitive decline (learning capacity, memory) and, in some cases, severe incapacitating diseases leading to dementia. Many studies have linked cognitive decline and dementia to arterial stiffness. Arterial stiffness is a normal process that appears with age but that could vary a lot between individuals. When large arteries become stiff, they lose their capacity to absorb the blood pulsatile energy resulting from blood ejection at each heartbeat. The absorption of pulsatile energy is a mechanism that protects small blood vessels like those in the brain. Consequently, stiff large arteries could no longer protect small vessels, which could result in a reduced cerebral blood flow and/or burst. This will decrease the level of oxygen delivered in the brain tissue. Arterial stiffness is not widely measured in the clinical practice due to the lack of a risk scale. We propose to establish a risk scale and identify a risk threshold of arterial stiffness that could impact brain's health in order to identify candidates who may benefit from therapy reducing arterial stiffness. This study will evaluate a group of elderly individuals through cognitive tests, brain imaging, pharmacological markers and the measurement of cardiovascular parameters with top-of-the-line technology to create comparison curves between all parameters and age groups. Thanks to a risk scale, it will become possible for clinicians to identify earlier vulnerable cases. Early detection of arterial stiffness and cognitive decline are our best tools to provide our elderly with longer and healthier lives.