Braden Lab

Research focus

NIH R01 · 2024

The Aging Autistic Brain: Multi-modal imaging to predict accelerated memory decline

Project Summary/Abstract Middle-age adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a 2.6x higher risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias than non-ASD. In children, ASD prevalence is ~2%. Since ASD is a lifelong condition, there will soon be a large population of elderly with an ASD diagnosis (~700,000 in the U.S within the next decade), with a lifetime cost of ~$3.6 million per person. In a series of two papers, we recently published accelerated longitudinal decline of memory and hippocampal volume in middle-age and older adults (MA+) with ASD, compared to matched controls. This adds to our cross-sectional findings of decreased hippocampal functional connectivity and…

From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.