Recipient organisationNIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre
NIHR supportRecorded as supported by this research centre
PeriodFeb 2025 — Ongoing
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
The link between a teenager's blood pressure or body weight and their brain structure decades later may hold clues to preventing dementia. Dementia research has focused overwhelmingly on people in mid-to-late life, leaving a critical gap: we do not know when cardiovascular risk factors such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes first begin to damage the brain. This project argues that the process may start in adolescence, a period largely ignored in studies of ageing-related disorders. By combining brain imaging, cardiovascular measurements, and epidemiological data in younger cohorts, the researchers aim to pinpoint the life stage at which poor cardiovascular health poses the greatest risk to lifelong brain health. If successful, this work could shift public health strategies toward earlier intervention—targeting modifiable risk factors in teenagers rather than waiting until midlife. That could change how schools, GPs, and health campaigns approach diet, exercise, and weight management, potentially reducing the burden of dementia decades before symptoms appear. The research is fundamentally about understanding when and how the seeds of later-life brain damage are sown, with clear implications for prevention.
View original technical description
Mounting evidence suggests that cumulative exposure to cardiovascular risk (e.g., obesity, hypertension, diabetes) is a key contributor to brain damage in dementia. However, the life stage at which poor cardiovascular health poses greatest risk is unclear. Current lifespan models of disease adopt midlife (40-65 years) as a critical window to target these factors and minimise risk, but conclusions have been driven mainly by investigations of mid-to-late life cohorts. We propose that underlying disease mechanisms may begin decades earlier. Adolescence has received insufficient attention in dementia research, yet it presents an important age where cardiovascular risk factors start influencing our physiology. Examination of younger cohorts may offer crucial insights into (a) how the developing brain is affected by such factors and (b) whether this constitutes the beginnings of life-long risk accumulation. This project is motivated by recent calls to consider that developmental differences resulting from early-life heart-brain associations may lay the foundation for dementia-related signatures in brain structure. We build on previous work in the group which revealed links between BMI, blood pressure, and exercise during childhood and adolescence and grey matter structure in regions with known links to dementia in old age. This is a novel line of enquiry, combining multimodal neuroimaging, cardiovascular science, and epidemiology to examine the relationship between cardiovascular profiles and the complex organisation of the brain during development - an often-overlooked phase of life when it comes to ageing disorders. Work from this project has the potential to impact public health by focusing on modifiable risk factors which are feasible targets for prevention and intervention efforts if we can establish when they begin posing a risk to lifelong brain health.
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