Aron S Buchman
Rush University, IL·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease begins silently. Memory and thinking problems appear only late, as dementia.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
mobility
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2027
What they work on
- Identify which digital mobility metrics best predict Alzheimer's dementia by adding motor planning and attention measures and multi-day wrist-sensor data to motor testing in about 1,000 Rush Memory and Aging Project participants.
- Group older adults into mobility subgroups with different dementia risks, and use brain pathology from 200 decedents to determine the disease damage underlying each subgroup.
- Measure the proteome in the supplementary motor area and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to find cortical proteins linked to mobility subgroups beyond dementia pathologies, then select those also tied to Alzheimer's dementia.
- Discover motor resilience genes by applying systems biology to RNA sequencing data from brain, spinal cord and muscle, after measuring Alzheimer's and related pathologies in each tissue.
- Verify motor resilience proteins with selected reaction monitoring mass spectrometry, test whether they also protect cognition, and combine them into a personal resilience index.
More about the research
Preventing the disease will require ways to spot it before symptoms. One promising early sign is mobility: walking and movement often decline before cognitive problems appear in older adults. Moving well draws on both motor and thinking abilities. Many older adults carry Alzheimer's-type brain damage, yet some keep moving and thinking well despite it. These projects use data and donated brain and body tissues from older adults in the Rush Memory and Aging Project. They ask why mobility predicts dementia, and which proteins protect some people from decline.
Why it matters
These studies could make walking and movement measured by wearable sensors a practical early warning sign for Alzheimer's dementia. They also aim to identify proteins that drive immobility or help older adults keep moving and thinking despite brain pathology. Such proteins could become drug targets for maintaining motor and cognitive function, helping millions of aging Americans.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Thinking about walking: Can digital phenotyping of mobility improve the prediction of Alzheimer's dementia and inform on the pathologies and proteins contributing to this association?
NIH · Sep 2022 – May 2027
Identifying resilience proteins in key motor tissues that drive motor and cognitive decline and offset the negative effects of ADRD pathologies within and outside the brain
NIH · Apr 2022 – Jan 2027
Closest labs
Kaitlin B Casaletto
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Identify networks of more than 150 synaptic proteins in autopsied brain tissue from 869 Rush Memory and Aging Project participants that relate to cognitive resilience, meaning better thinking than brain pathology would predict.
Katherine Hackett
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Measure mobility, sociability and device-use patterns from one month of passive smartphone data, including GPS location habits and call activity, in well-characterized older adults at an Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
Glenn Smith
University of Florida, FL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Complete 230 planned longitudinal follow-up visits with harmonized assessments across 1Florida ADRC sites and provide the data to the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC).
The school
Rush University: 7 labs on PI Pages, $139M a year on research, 26 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.