Researchers receive grants to study the brain in patients with Alzheimer’s

The National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded two grants, totaling about $3.7 million each, to study the link between sugar breakdown and the aging brain. One study, led by Andrei Vlassenko, MD, PhD, assistant professor of radiology, and Manu Goyal, MD, assistant professor of radiology, both at the School of Medicine, will investigate how the brain uses glucose and oxygen to maintain its health during aging, and how glucose and oxygen use changes as people with Alzheimer’s disease get worse. The other study, led by Vlassenko and Marcus Raichle, MD, professor of radiology at the School of Medicine, will measure how much glucose the brain uses, and for what purposes, in order to assess whether glucose usage can be used to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia.