Sharing of Lifespan Brain Study Data Expected To Light New Paths

Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) have released the full dataset from a decade-long project designed to track brain and cognitive health as people age and distinguish neurologically healthy paths from those indicating a likelihood of decline.

The Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (DLBS) combined brain and cognition measures across the adult lifetime, including an expansive range of imaging and tests at three points across 10 years in nearly 500 individual healthy peoples’ lives. An article published on May 26 in Nature’s Scientific Data provides an overview of the project and outlines its significance, which includes data collected from 2008 to 2020.

Dr. Denise Park, Distinguished University Chair in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and CVL director of research, is the originator of the project. She said that one can think of the brain as an orchestra playing, with different parts becoming important in different phases of a composition.

“This repository allows us to see the brain all at once,” Park said. “Releasing this data will allow the exploration of and characterization of how the brain changes in many different facets as we age. You can learn one thing from white matter, another from gray matter and another from neuron activation.”

Dr. Gagan Wig, co-corresponding author of the article and an associate professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, said, “We have been using this dataset to study trajectories of aging across adulthood, including middle age, which has been understudied. The DLBS has been allowing us to identify individual characteristics that predict cognitive decline and disease.”

The DLBS was launched with a Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Award (R37) to Park from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, that provided long-term funding, in this case for 10 years. That allowed the team to devote its time entirely to gathering data without the need to publish results within an early time frame.

The DLBS assessed 464 initial participants age 21 to 89; 338 returned for a second assessment three to five years later, and 224 underwent a third data collection after another similar interval.

“Having three timepoints is a rarity among studies of brain aging across adulthood,” Wig said. “So often, studies of aging are based on cross-sectional comparisons of younger and older people, not looking at the same individuals followed over time. Longitudinal testing is critical for understanding how and why individuals age the way they do.”

Each evaluation included a comprehensive neuropsychological battery; questionnaires assessing physical and neurological health; a wide range of imaging scans, including structural and functional MRIs; and measures of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain via positron-emission tomography (PET) scans.

Wig said the study was innovative in its inclusion of middle-aged participants, early adoption of brain scans that allowed measurement of brain networks and its gathering of PET data from a cognitively normal sample. Significant findings that have come from the DLBS data include demonstrations of brain network breakdown that are evident across the lifespan and descriptions of the presence of high levels of amyloid in healthy adults, discoveries that have subsequently been verified in further research.

“Finding healthy adults who had amyloid burden was the first clue that amyloid might not be sufficient for cognitive impairment,” Wig said. “Since then, some efforts to clear amyloid from the brain have been successful, but there have been mixed results in terms of deterring further cognitive decline.”

Researchers now believe that amyloid is a precipitating factor for the aggregation of tau tangles, which are an additional signature of Alzheimer’s disease. The most recent wave of DLBS contains data that is allowing researchers to examine tau in the brain.

“The availability of this valuable data is allowing scientists to evaluate and refine dominant models of disease and cognitive aging,” Wig said.

Park views the causes of cognitive decline as pieces in a puzzle that can be different for everyone.

“Some people have heavily degraded white matter that causes issues. Others have problems with activation or brain shrinkage. No two people are alike,” she said. “We can’t point to any single pattern. But we’re heading toward being able to understand why certain people are in decline, and we’re learning more about potential causes.”

The open-access data provides the opportunity for researchers worldwide to test hypotheses about brain and cognition across adulthood. Although the CVL and other scientists have already published extensively based on this data, Park said those publications have only scratched the surface in terms of what this information can reveal about the cognitive neuroscience of aging.

“The publication of our open repository will allow the data to be more broadly accessible in the neuroscience, medical and psychological communities. Beyond cognition measures, the dataset also contains a large number of surveys and instruments measuring specific health indicators, behavior and personality in individuals across adulthood,” Wig said. “Our team plans to continue to mine this dataset for years as we try to understand individual trajectories of cognitive health, and we’re excited for others to more easily do so as well.”

As Park approached her retirement this year, she faced an important choice: to devote several years to preparing the volumes of data to be shared with the world, or to focus on continuing to publish papers based on the data.

“I decided the best use of my time was to invest in this discipline by sharing the data with the world,” she said. “I take a lot of pride in the fact that we completed this in an elegant manner. The data is very easy for people to use if they come in with a hypothesis. I view that as a bigger contribution to science.”

Park said she hopes the legacy of the repository will be to provide the field of neuroscience with more questions to explore and the means to explore them.

“I feel vindicated. I spent a decade of my career on this project, and I worried that maybe I was chasing something that would not prove to be truly important,” she said. “The data appearing in this publication will continue to have an impact, to pose questions for others to solve — and I’m sure they will.”

Other UT Dallas-affiliated authors include psychology professors Dr. Kristen Kennedy and Dr. Karen Rodrigue; former CVL research scientist Dr. Joseph P. Hennessee; CVL research associate Evan T. Smith MS’15, PhD’21; and CVL research scientist Micaela Chan MS’12, PhD’16. Additional authors were from UT Southwestern Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

This work was supported by NIA grants 5R37AG-006265-27 and RC1AG036199.