Julia Rao

Julia Rao, M.S., is a clinical neuropsychology Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She works with Dr. Sandra Weintraub at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center. Julia’s research focuses on normal aging, successful aging, and dementia. Julia’s Master’s thesis examined semantic interference in naming abilities for subtypes of Primary Progressive Aphasia. Her dissertation project focuses on “SuperAging.” An important emphasis of current Alzheimer’s disease research involves the identification of cognitively intact individuals at greatest risk for developing dementia. An alternative, but equally compelling approach, is to study older individuals (80 years and over) from the community who show relatively little decline in cognitive function over the lifespan and perform equivalently to 50 year-olds on measures of episodic memory. These individuals are known as SuperAgers. My project seeks to examine the brain structural factors that contribute to SuperAgers’ cognitive preservation. I propose to study two brain structures, the hippocampus and amygdala, both of which have been linked to episodic memory and AD. These structures tend to reduce in volume as people age; however, the reductions in size are more dramatic for those at risk for developing AD. I am currently measuring the volume of these two structures for the 30 (and growing) 80+ year-olds who fulfill criteria for SuperAgers and comparing their hippocampal and amygdalar volumes to other 80 year-olds who show age-appropriate decline in episodic memory performance and 50 year-olds who test at a level consistent with their age. The findings of this study will help to determine whether the extraordinary memory performance of the SuperAgers is mediated by an absence of age-related shrinkage of two key brain structures involved in episodic memory, the hippocampus and amygdala.