Cat brain age like human brains - a key to understanding cognitive decay
Cat brain age like human brains - a key to understanding cognitive decay
Um To decipher the secrets of human aging , researchers may rather look at the cat that is reduced on their couch than on a Laborborra .
In older cats, the brains show signs of Atrophie and cognitive decline , which corresponds much more to the changes that can be observed in older people than the changes in the brain of aging mice. These findings were presented last month at Lake Conference on Comparative and Evolutionary Neurobiology near Seattle, Washington.
The results are part of an extensive project with the name Translating time href = "https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00069-2" Data-Track = "Click" Data-Label = "https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00069-2" Data-track-category Text Link "> Brain development Compared of over 150 mammals and is now expanded to include data about aging. The hope is that this data will help the researchers, the causes of age-related diseases, especially those who affect the brain, such as Alzheimer to decrypt.
"In order to meet challenges in human medicine, we have to draw from a variety of model systems," says Christine Charvet, a comparative neuroscientist at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama, who presented the work. "Cats, lemurs, mice are all useful. We shouldn't concentrate our efforts on one."
ages in dog fris years
The Translating Time project began in the 1990s as a tool for developmental biologists. 1 collected data collected How long the brain takes to achieve different development milestones in a variety of mammals and used this data to show the relative development of two types over time too graphically. This can help researchers link observations of animal development to the corresponding human age.
Over the years, however, researchers Charvet have repeatedly asked whether the database was not on the Change of the brain with the aging of the animals
scientists have long been frustrated with the restrictions of the standard laboratory models when it comes to human aging and its effects on to understand the unique human brain . Mice only live for a few years - not long enough to collect a lot of damage that is considered the cause of some neurodegenerative diseases in humans. In addition, mice could have mechanisms that people are missing to Deposits of misfolded proteins that are known as plaques and represent a license plate of Alzheimer's disease , says Melissa Edler, a comparative neurobiologist at Kent State University in Ohio.
The evolutionary discrepancy between mice and humans could often have failed why the efforts of developing therapies to treat the disease have often failed, says Elaine Guevara, who examines evolutionary genetics at primates at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. " mice do not develop the classic features of Alzheimer's disease ," she says. "Your brains are very different from ours."
our pets, we ourselves
Accompanying animals could be an alternative solution. They live longer than mice, share the surroundings with their owners and are susceptible to human diseases, including Objection and Diabetes . The Dog Aging Project , the researcher of the University of Washington in Seattle and Texas A & M University College station is carried out tens of thousands of accompanying dogs to learn more about how their Genetics , the lifestyle and the environment influence aging.
Yes Centuries of breeding have influenced aging and diseases in dogs, says Charvet. Cats often live a little longer than dogs, they add, and are generally not so much grown to certain properties - some of them also increase the risk of illness.
That is why Charvet and her colleagues have started collecting data from veterinary practices and zoos and launching an initiative called Catage Project, which calls for cat owners to data about their Pets to submit.
So far, they have collected health files and results of blood tests from thousands of cats and carried out brain scans of more than 50. With its own data and the published literature, the team fills events along the non-linear relationship between cat and human age. A one-year-old cat, for example, corresponds to about an 18-year-old person. In the following year, however, a cat only ages about 4 "human years" and reaches maturity that corresponds approximately to that of a 22-year-old person.
At the age of 15, a cat is an eighties in human years. Until then, some cats have experienced a cognitive decline, and the brain scans collected by the team show changes in brain volume in older cats that resemble changes in older people, says Charvet. Earlier work has also shown that cats can accumulate plaques and threads of abnormal proteins that are similar to those who characterize the Alzheimer's disease in humans.
diverse models
Ultimately, researchers could develop a variety of model systems for various aspects of aging and neurodegeneration, says Edler. Although mice are bad models for some aspects of human aging, they will still be valuable because it is so easy for researchers to carry out genetic experiments with the rodents, she says.
other animals, such as cats or certain non -human primates, could be better models for other aspects of the brain age. Caleb Finch, who examines the evolution of the life story at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, advocates a more intensive investigation of Naked Moles , which surprisingly long for small rodents and Have cancer rates .
"Cats are useful," says Charvet. "But they will only be useful to a certain point. Other model systems are also necessary."
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Finlay, B. L. & Darlington, R. B. Science 268, 1578–1584 (1995).