September Roundtable 2025

Young at Heart: Linking vascular, brain and cognitive health in older adults.

Abstract: Modifiable lifestyle factors in mid-late life impact cardiovascular health and increase dementia risk. Early detection of subtle deviation from one’s own baseline level of functioning can be a powerful motivator for individuals to adopt lifestyle changes early enough to maintain functional ability and reduce risk of cognitive decline in late life. Conventional clinical markers used in primary health (e.g., blood pressure) only detect the presence of cardiovascular risk factors after years of subtle cumulative vascular damage. More sensitive measures (e.g., transcranial Doppler) are not practical for regular clinical assessment.

Our team is working with our US collaborators to develop a composite biomarker for monitoring an individual’s healthy ageing trajectory that can be used in primary health settings. This works centres around novel measures of regional cerebrovascular health derived from the arterial pulse wave, using diffuse optical tomography methods (pulse-DOT). Pulse-DOT provides a non-invasive measure of brain arterial elasticity that is sensitive to variability in cognitive function, measures of brain structure and cardiorespiratory fitness in mid-late life healthy adults. I will present early work from our lab examining links between cerebral arterial health, cardiovascular health, lifestyle factors and cognitive functioning.

Bio: Dr Karayanidis is a Professor in Psychology in the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Newcastle and Director of UON’s Functional Neuroimaging Lab. She leads a multidisciplinary research program aimed at developing accessible composite vascular and neural brain biomarkers that predict risk of age-related cognitive decline, that can be implemented in community or primary health services to empower individuals to map their healthy ageing journey. She uses neuropsychological and neural measures and has most recently introduced to Australia a novel methodology for quantifying regional cerebral arterial health, patented by Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton, US collaborators at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Dr Karayanidis is an elected Fellow of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australasian Society for Cognitive Neuroscience (ACNS).

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