< Symposia

Symposium Session 3 - Beyond biomarkers: Comprehensive approaches to brain resilience in aging and dementia

Chair: Randy McIntosh¹; ¹Simon Fraser University
Presenters: Brianne Kent, Kelly Shen, Alex Wiesman, Parveen Bhatti, Anthony McIntosh, Natasha Rajah, Roger Dixon, Gillian Einstein, Yaakov Stern, Karen Campbell, Sarah Henderson, Selma Lugtmeijer, Linda Geerligs, Audrey Duarte, Jessica Campbell, Sarah Henderson, Kyoungeun Lee, Allie Clark, Vince Calhoun, Vonetta Dotson

The human brain is embedded in the body, and the body is embedded in a complex personal and social environment. Understanding the variability of brain health trajectories into late life, therefore, requires a more inclusive and comprehensive view of the brain’s resilience to new or adverse events. This symposium brings together leading researchers who will highlight advances in cognitive neuroscience approaches to resilience in aging, emphasizing the need for more inclusive population studies, naturalistic approaches, and multimodal data collection and integration that extends beyond the typical neuroscience methodologies. Together, these talks will underscore the importance of moving beyond reductionist paradigms toward transdisciplinary, inclusive, and ecologically valid approaches. A panel discussion will follow, offering an opportunity for speakers and audience members to engage in dialogue on how best to advance research on brain resilience that reflects the complexity of aging.

Presentations

The Brain Resilience Study: a dataset of the biological and sociocultural factors affecting brain health in older adults

Brianne Kent¹, Kelly Shen¹, Alex Wiesman¹, Parveen Bhatti², Anthony McIntosh¹; ¹Simon Fraser University, ²University of British Columbia

Dementia arises from a complex interplay of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. However, previous large-scale studies have largely focused on biomarkers and genetics, with limited attention to the social and structural determinants of health that shape diverse aging trajectories. In 2024, we launched the Brain Resilience Study (BRS) to addresses this gap by integrating multimodal biological and cognitive measures with rich demographic, psychosocial, and lifestyle data to create an open resource for studying resilience to dementia. We are recruiting adults aged 50 years and older from the British Columbia Generations Project, a population-based cohort with extensive pre-existing sociodemographic, lifestyle, occupational, and residential data that has been collected since 2009. In 1,000+ participants, we are collecting additional information about dementia risk factors, as well as cognitive testing, sleep assessments, portable EEG, and genetic sequencing. Sub-studies have also collected high-resolution neuroimaging (MRI, MEG) and circadian rhythm biomarkers. BRS data will be openly shared as a Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) standardized dataset. By capturing variables often overlooked in dementia research, the BRS provides an unprecedented opportunity to study brain health in diverse aging populations. This resource will lay the foundation for longitudinal follow-up and future computational modeling, supporting the development of early, personalized, and equitable interventions to promote brain resilience across the lifespan.

A roadmap for conducting more inclusive brain resilience research on aging and dementia

Natasha Rajah^1,2, Roger Dixon³, Gillian Einstein⁴, Yaakov Stern⁵; ¹Toronto Metropolitan University, ²McGill University, ³University of Alberta, ⁴University of Toronto, ⁵Columbia University

The variability in cognitive and brain aging trajectories may be influenced by inter-individual and community-level differences in resilience that result for differential exposures to social determinants of health (SDH). Moreover, an individual’s biological sex, and sociocultural gender will also affect their resilience. However, there remains no clear guidance on how to best integrate these diversity-related factors, i.e. sex, gender and SDH, in clinical and cognitive neuroscience research on resilience in aging and dementia. The international Brain Resilience and Diversity in Aging and Dementia (BReDAD) Collaboratory (https://resilienceandaging.com/) was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Aging, in 2024 with the goals of synthesizing knowledge, identifying knowledge gaps, and developing recommendations for conducting more inclusive research on resilience in aging and dementia. Based on a focused review of the literature, including discussions and recommendations of the Collaboratory, a roadmap was developed for integrating diversity in future resilience research. The roadmap recommendations includes: i) developing trust and meaningful long-term relationships with communities historically excluded from research, ii) diversifying who is engaged in all aspects of the research process, iii) adopting a life course perspective, iv) improving and expanding research designs and measurement tools, and v) using sensitive computational analytics and mixed methods for testing complex, intersectional, models. Details about these recommendations for promoting transdisciplinary approach in resilience research to better reflect the complexities inherent in studying diversity and developing precision medicine outcomes will be presented.

Older brains appear more resilient under naturalistic conditions

Karen Campbell¹, Sarah Henderson^1,2, Selma Lugtmeijer³, Linda Geerligs⁴; ¹Brock University, ²University of Texas at Austin, ³University of Birmingham, ⁴Raboud University

Our brains evolved to process complex, meaningful stimuli that arrive at our senses in a continuous manner, not lists of pictures and words, sinusoidal gratings, nor isolated sounds devoid of context. Yet most of what we know about the cognitive neuroscience of aging has relied on these tightly controlled but highly artificial stimuli. Recent work from our lab and others has started to use naturalistic stimuli (such as movies and stories) to examine age differences in neurocognitive functioning under conditions that more closely mimic everyday life. We have shown that some effects, such as increased frontal activation during task performance, may relate to the attentional demands of the task itself (e.g., deciding if a sentence is grammatical vs natural listening) rather than a change in how the brain carries out a given cognitive process. We have also shown that while age relates to reduced neural synchronization during movie watching in some regions (e.g., the frontoparietal network) synchronization in other regions (e.g., the language network) does not change with age. Indeed, younger and older adults even look at the same places when watching the same film, and their brains shift between neural states at similar timepoints. The degree of this shift between neural states relates to subsequent memory for the movie in both younger and older adults. Taken together, these results suggest that age differences in neurocognitive functioning are minimized under naturalistic conditions, possibly because these are the conditions our brains evolved to process.

How even low levels of depression may reduce resilience to age-related memory impairments in ethnoracially diverse populations

Audrey Duarte¹, Jessica Campbell¹, Sarah Henderson¹, Kyoungeun Lee², Allie Clark¹, Vince Calhoun³, Vonetta Dotson²; ¹University of Texas at Austin, ²Georgia State University, ³Tri-institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science

Emerging evidence suggests that even minimal levels of depressive symptoms are associated with reduced resilience to age-related memory impairment and decline, effectively moving forward the point at which cognitive impairments characteristic of aging appear. The mechanisms underlying these “double jeopardy” effects and the exacerbating and ameliorating factors are unclear. Even less is known about depression-related memory impairments in Black and Mexican Americans, who are poorly represented in affective neuroscience research, despite evidence of more severe and disabling depression, and greater Alzheimer’s disease prevalence, compared to non-Hispanic Whites (NHW). Emerging evidence from our group has shown that depression-related executive dysfunction and associated PFC dysfunction may underlie depression-related memory impairments, double jeopardy effects, and ethnoracial disparities in these impairments across the adult lifespan. In a new multisite, multi-year project, we are investigating an executive dysfunction theory of depression-related memory impairments and decline by manipulating executive functioning demands during episodic encoding and using multimodal imaging to investigate PFC contributions to these impairments. Recent findings from this project will be presented including discussion of multiple race-related proxy factors (e.g., discrimination, vascular burden, religiosity) that may explain or confer resilience against depression-related memory impairments.