2019 participants
Yu Heng Brian Tan
Instructions to move are sent from the brain to the spinal cord over several neural pathways. The most important such link, the corticospinal tract, has been shown to lose 25% of its axons by the age of 50, yet at this age it seems to have few consequences for movements. We do not know how the spinal terminations from this and other tracts change to compensate for the axonal loss. Do surviving connections strengthen uniformly, or does the balance between pathways change? We need to fill this gap in our understanding, as it could prove critical to understanding some of the difficulties with movements which appear later in ageing, such as frailty, sarcopenia and increased risk of falls. In this project, we will analyse spinal terminals of descending pathways using anatomical methods in aged and young macaque monkeys, which have a very similar motor system to humans.
Funding source: Newcastle University
Project supervisor: Professor Stuart Baker