Alzeihmer's Month Q&A

JACK SIERPUTOWSKI Opinion Editor

September is World Alzheimer’s Month, and UTD is a hotbed for both Alzheimer’s related research and activism.

Denise Park is the Founding Director for the Center of Vital Longevity and a Distinguished University Chair in Brain and Behavioral Sciences. She has spent her entire career studying the aging mind and is currently finalizing her landmark Dallas Lifespan Brain Study.

Could you tell me a little bit about the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study?

"So as people get older, they face some structural and some functional challenges. In terms of the structural, their brain. Some people deposit amyloid. We know that because we found that sometimes when people would die of causes other than Alzheimer's disease, when an autopsy was done, they would find that people had brains that looked like they had Alzheimer's disease, but they were performing normally…

I would've predicted that the brain would show less activity as it got older, because everything else is bad, but that's actually not true. As people get older, they show more activity in their brain when they're performing a task than a young person…And we've actually done a lot of research, and I think we have isolated definitively that this extra activation is not noise. It is support for your aging brain. So we've argued that people, as they face these general challenges, create these compensatory scaffolds that protect their brain and help them solve problems and do things."

How common is it for people to have amyloid buildup but not show signs of cognitive decline?

"It's pretty common. About 20% of people over 65 have amyloid in their brains. And they're really pretty asymptomatic…the truth is that people have had this amyloid for a long time and they're not getting that much worse. They're still pretty normal. So the amyloid—on one hand, you really wouldn't want to have it. And it would be really disturbing to know if you had it because it's an incurable disease. But on the other hand, it's lurking there, but it's nothing serious. So it doesn't really take effect for many years.

And we're trying to get people at the very earliest phases so that when we do have some treatments, we can treat them like we treat hypertension—where you never really get super ill. You deal with the hypertension as soon as you find it and control it… And the scaffolding model suggests that if you stay very mentally active and keep developing these scaffolds that you'll protect your brain to some extent. Just to some extent, not totally and not forever, but it's very meaningful to slow down Alzheimer's disease by five years, because people wouldn't get it. If they get five more years, they're likely to die of something else."

Breanna Shen is a senior majoring in neuroscience at UTD and the founder and president of UTD’s chapter of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA). The AFA is dedicated to raising awareness about the disease and volunteering in impactful ways.

What kind of places does the AFA volunteer around Richardson?

So the two ways that we are trying to achieve our mission is through volunteering and through education. So for the volunteering component, we have UTD students go to nursing homes in

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Rainbow Coalition demands swifter action against Farage

Students expressed frustration at Farage's continued employment at campus protest

Comets gathered in protest against Computer Science professor Timothy Farage because of the lack of repercussions after his Twitter comments made in July.

Students from UTD Pride, Student Government, the National Women’s Association, the United Communist Party, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and more showed in waves of support at the Chess Plaza on Sep. 12 to sign a petition to take action against Farage’s career. The standing rally displayed students holding pro-LGBTQIA+ and antiracist signs calling into account Farage’s tweets and classroom discussions that made national news last summer.

“I’ve already had current students come up to me and express how uncomfortable they are in his class, that he’s still saying the things we’ve shown concern for. If UTD has gone up its chain of command to issue a verbal or written warning, it obviously hasn’t worked,” Psychology junior Chase Mueller, who spearheaded the demonstration, said.

Protestors said that Farage had broken the Code of Conduct, which all UTD

SEE DEMONSTRATION, PAGE 9