Institute of Ageing: A tour

While in Newcastle last week I revisited the Institute of Ageing run by Professor Kirkwood.  I was shown around their suite of new buildings mostly paid for by the Wellcome Trust, full of sparkling new laboratories and rooms for examining volunteers for the multitude of clinical trials that are running at any one time.  

In order to understand the effects of ageing on the brain, much of the important research depends on studying volunteers in the later stages of life right through to death, when their donated brains are carefully removed for detailed analysis and storage.  They are kept in the Brain Tissue Resource, or brain bank, where over a thousand of these donated brains are kept either in specially cold freezers or preserved in tubs. For inspection, the brains are usually sliced very finely for examination under microscopes.

I was also shown the 'Gait Lab', a windowless room full of cameras, where they use Motion Capturing technology, designed for the animation film industry, but used here to examine the effects of different diseases like dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson's on the way people walk.  Apparently it could be used as a diagnostic tool in the future, because movement is one of the first things effected by both diseases.

The institute is also home to one of the most powerful MRI scanners in the country.  It is used to examine the brains of living volunteers to try to understand how exactly brains are effected by diseases like Alzheimer's, and how these changes alter the behavior of the sufferer.

My plan is to return and film interviews in and around each of these locations  with a leading researcher in each field, to try to construct a comprehensible picture of the current state of research into dementia, and how it is understood.