Professor Laura Fratiglioni of the Aging Research Center has received a grant in aging and health from the Swedish Research Council. The project is entitled “The body-mind connection: Exploring the biological mechanisms underlying the effects of somatic health on brain aging”. The program will be carried out by a group of experts from four centers at Karolinska Institute, Karolinska University Hospital, and Perugia University in Italy.
The project is a multidisciplinary research program to identify strategies and treatments to better and more effectively reduce poor health in older adults. The researchers will focus on brain aging and diseases such as Alzheimer’s, using an approach that integrates mind and body perspectives by addressing a wide variety of research questions about possible common underlying biological causes.

Using information from three existing population-based studies, integrated with information from blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans the researchers will organize seven connected projects with four major aims:
1) Verify whether associations between individual factors such as those related to the brain and environmental factors such as lifestyle and body- and mind-related disorders may be explained by similar underlying biological causes;
2) Determine the most important biological mechanisms that may explain the associations between physical disorders and cognitive problems or dementia;
3) Detect the positive and negative roles of drug use and use of multiple drugs and their links to bodily and mental health; and
4) Measure the impact of mental decline and dementia on physical functioning and disability.