Dopaminergic Circuits in Age-Related Postoperative Delirium
Description: Postoperative delirium (POD) is a serious and potentially fatal health complication among the elderly, affecting up to 52% of older adults following surgery. There are no approved treatments for POD in part because its causes are unknown. The risk for POD is increased in individuals with pre-existing sustained attention deficits, one of the earliest cognitive domains to be impacted in aging. Sustained attention refers to the process of allocating cognitive resources to respond to task-relevant stimuli and is strongly regulated by dopamine neural circuits. For this Banting Fellowship, I am proposing to investigate the ventral tegmental area (VTA) - a dopaminergic hub in the midbrain adversely affected in aging - on the development of sustained attention deficits and POD in naturally aging rats. I have developed a method of assessing attention in rats using a touchscreen-based video game, in which real-time cognitive recovery can be assessed following general anesthesia to capture the severity and duration of POD symptoms. In objective 1, I will establish the role of age-related sustained attention deficits on POD severity in aging rats using this novel behavioral testing paradigm. In objective 2, I will activate dopaminergic VTA neurons to determine their role in age-related POD. I expect that as age-related attentional impairments worsen in rats, severity and duration of POD-like symptoms will increase. Further, I hypothesize that activation of dopaminergic VTA projections will alleviate age-related POD symptoms. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Anesthesia Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), I am part of a community with an exceptional research record and am ideally positioned to develop these novel neural circuit-based approaches in POD research. The outcome of this work will yield important insight on the role of dopaminergic circuits implicated in age-related attentional impairment and how they may be targeted to prevent, or treat, POD
Amount: CA$70,000
Funding type: fellowship
Funder scheme: Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Start date: 2022-04-01
End date: 2022-11-30
Investigator: Kathleen Vincent
Institution: Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Funded outputs count: 0
Funder award ID: 180179_1
OpenAlex ID: G8763564422