Mental Ageing

A person's ability to think, learn, and regulate emotions in later life can change or remain stable, and this project will track the life-long factors that determine which path they take. This matters because impairments in these mental functions—cognition and emotion—are the biggest cause of disability in the UK. While much research focuses on dementia, we know far less about what keeps mental function healthy or resilient in the face of adversity, and how that resilience works across a full lifetime. The project will investigate three specific themes: what allows good cognitive and emotional function despite hardship; how heart and blood vessel health (the main modifiable risk factors for dementia, especially in midlife) relate to mental ageing; and whether depression becomes more or less common as people age, and what life-course factors drive that change. If successful, the research could reshape how we think about healthy ageing. It may identify windows in midlife where cardiovascular interventions have the greatest payoff for later cognition, or reveal protective factors that build emotional resilience decades before old age. This is fundamental science—it will not deliver a treatment tomorrow—but understanding the natural history of mental ageing is a necessary step toward preventing the disability it causes.