Year 2
While age-related cognitive dysfunction and dementia in humans are clearly distinct entities and affect different brain regions, the aging brain shows the telltale molecular and cellular changes that characterize most neurodegenerative diseases. Remarkably, the aging brain remains plastic and exercise or dietary changes can increase cognitive function in humans and animals, with animal brains showing a reversal of some of the aforementioned biological changes associated with aging. We showed recently that blood-borne factors coming outside the brain can inhibit or promote adult neurogenesis in an age-dependent fashion in mice. Accordingly, exposing an old mouse to a young systemic environment or to plasma from young mice increased neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity, and improved contextual fear conditioning and spatial learning and memory. Preliminary proteomic studies show several proteins with stem cell activity increase in old “rejuvenated” mice supporting the notion that young blood may contain increased levels of beneficial factors with regenerative capacity. We believe we have identified some of these factors now and tested them on cultured mouse and human neural stem cell derived cells. Preliminary data suggest that these factors have beneficial effects and we will test whether these effects hold true in living mice.