Now in its 20th year, the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging is powered by local volunteers – Post Bulletin

ROCHESTER — A major research program focused on aging and cognitive function, powered by thousands of participants in Olmsted County, has entered its 20th year.

Constructed from extensive medical records collected by

The Rochester Epidemiology Project,

The Mayo Clinic Study on Aging has involved more than 7,500 people in Olmsted County since 2004. There are about 3,000 active participants who contribute blood, scans and other information to researchers, said Dr. Ronald Petersen, a Mayo Clinic neurologist and study director. .

Researchers and hundreds of study participants will gather on Saturday, November 2, for the study’s annual appreciation event, which marks 20 years of research with deep community participation.

“It’s really the generosity of the people of Olmsted County, the trust they have in us and we have in them,” Petersen said. “This is an incredibly important asset.”

Post Bulletin: How he did

Mayo Clinic Aging Study

START?

Peterson: The Mayo Clinic Study on Aging began as a typical study of what is called population-based sampling. So in 2004, we started this study, which was a random sample of people living in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Why? Because we and Olmsted Medical Center provide care for virtually everyone in the county. They are all our patients and we know who they are, (so) we can sample them in a random fashion.

Everyone became eligible for the study, and we were looking at aging and cognition, memory, thinking skills. In 2004, we began sampling people aged 70 to 89. We’re looking at those two decades of aging because that’s where the action is in terms of cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease and the like.

But then, as other biomarkers became available, it dropped off in my 50s, and I’ve been on the decline since then until my 30s. We are currently sampling six decades of aging.

Post Bulletin: How do participants contribute to your research?

Peterson: We bring people in about every year and do a clinical assessment, measure their memory and so on. But we also get a lot of other information about their biology. … We know their medical background, so if we’re studying the role of, say, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking on cognition, we have the medical records of that data.

(We) have now followed some people for 14, 15, 16 years in this study, which is very unique, and we’ve also drawn blood on them, so we have blood-based biomarkers every year for their entire participation to study.

We do imaging studies; We did about 8,000 MRI scans, thousands of PET scans to look for amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, the two proteins that define Alzheimer’s disease.

Many of them, we do autopsies; they are willing to give (their brain) after they die, to let you look inside the brain. I’ve been studying these people for 10 years, and their bottom line is, “OK, now validate all that stuff you’re measuring against what’s in my brain when I die.” So thank you very much to those individuals.

Post Bulletin: Over the past 20 years, how has our understanding of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease changed, either from the findings of the Study on Aging or from the work of other researchers?

Peterson: How do we define Alzheimer’s disease? Twenty years ago, it was because of the clinical features: a person’s memory is impaired, it started slowly for several years, now it no longer works well. We’d say, “Well, it’s got to be Alzheimer’s.”

What we’ve developed over the years is that we can now look at proteins, this amyloid and tau protein in the brain, in living people, so we don’t just have to rely on clinical features. … Let’s look to see if they have the biological characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease (by spinal tap or PET scan).

What has happened in recent years is now

blood tests became available

to help us tell if the person has amyloid and tau proteins in the brain. PET scans are expensive; not everyone can do them. Spinal points are vertebral bags, so not everyone wants to do them, but a blood test is relatively simple.

That’s where the Mayo Clinic Study on Aging comes in, because we have blood samples that go back years and years and years for many, many people. So we can look at their blood samples when they were normal, their blood samples when they had MCI (mild cognitive impairment), and their blood samples when they have dementia. … The Study of Aging has provided a lot of background information.

Post Bulletin: Besides dementia and Alzheimer’s, what else do you and your colleagues investigate through the Study of Aging?

Peterson: We think of this as an institutional resource, meaning it’s a Mayo Clinic, Olmsted Medical Center resource to look at all kinds of things. So we had people from other areas in the clinic looking at our population. We had cardiologists look at (participants’) electrocardiograms, we had cardiologists look at their genetic characteristics of heart conditions.

We’ve had pulmonologists follow people in intensive care units—they say, “Well, you’ve seen over 7,000 people. Probably hundreds of them have been in an intensive care unit for one reason or another… We are interested in looking at those people who have been in our intensive care units and asking the question: what happened to them more far in their memory and thinking?”

All the blood that we’ve drawn—we have over 30,000 blood samples over the years that we’ve collected—we also share with the facility, so if someone has a question about a particular protein for kidney disease, we have human samples. So it’s really a rich resource for others as well.

Post Bulletin: What are the questions that you and your colleagues studying cognitive disorders want to answer in the next 20 years?

Peterson: We will have combination therapies that will treat cognitive impairment as people age – I think that will be in the future. The Mayo Clinic Study on Aging is a perfect setting to study this because, again, we’re taking all comers. … With blood studies and imaging studies, we will be able to inform the field about how to make these diagnoses, develop biomarkers and then ultimately treatments.