Transcript
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[Title card animation: Dementia Australia Research Foundation - Understand]
[Associate Professor Michelle Lupton, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute]
Assoc. Prof. Michelle: I am Michelle Lupton and I'm associate professor at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. As we know that dementia is very common, it's the biggest cause of disability in people over the age of 65, and with our ageing population. More and more people will go on to develop dementia and Alzheimer's disease. People start to develop problems in their brain up to 20 years prior to the onset of clinical symptoms, and this very early stage would be the best stage to try and find treatments or interventions that could prevent the onset of dementia. Our work is aiming to identify people who are in this very early disease phase. One problem with dementia is that it starts to make changes in our brains up to 20 years before the onset of clinical symptoms, so it's really important to identify people who are in this very, very early disease phase.
One of the main problems with Alzheimer's is that you don't have any symptoms until a lot of damage has already been done in the brain. A big part of our research is identifying people who are at middle aged or older who are likely to go on to develop Alzheimer's disease, and we want to identify markers – so signs that we can use to predict whether they will get dementia or Alzheimer's. One area that I'm working on that was funded by Dementia Australia Research Foundation was to look at what we call epigenetic markers in people's DNA. We inherit our DNA from our parents, and this can't be changed within our lifetime, but there are chemical modifications to the DNA that affect how our DNA is read and it's expressed. Methylation is a word we use but just to put it simply, it's changes to the DNA that can be affected by our lifestyle or environment, and they change how our DNA is expressed or how it makes changes in our body.
To detect methylation in the blood, we first extract the DNA from blood samples from our research participants. And as part of this study, we're doing really in-depth neuroimaging and cognitive testing of these individuals. The Dementia Australia Research Foundation has funded an aspect of this where we are collecting blood samples from participants to be able to assess their DNA and look at these methylation changes in the DNA, and the aim would be to identify a profile of methylation changes that will be associated with the onset of dementia. To be able to do this, we needed to fund very expensive methylation arrays in a large number of people. And so, this was made possible by the Dementia Australia Research Foundation funding. It's our hope that this research will be used to develop affordable biomarker for Alzheimer's disease – this would be tests that people could take to be selected for things like clinical trials or early treatment. It's been really important for me to receive the Dementia Australia Research Foundation funding to be able to progress my research career in the dementia field.
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This research is supported by:
Celia Margaret Hudson Dementia Research Grant
QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
Associate Professor Lupton would like to acknowledge:
The research team (Professor Nick Martin, Dr Allan McRae and Dr Christine Guo) and the Prospective Imaging Study of Ageing, led by Professor Michael Breakspear.
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Dementia Australia Research Foundation:
A cure is just the beginning
If you would like to see dementia research make real impact, donate today:
1300 636 679
www.dementia.org.au/donate-research
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