Eric Swedlund, Arizona Daily Star

From momentarily forgetting a name to misplacing car keys, "senior moments" may be commonplace, but very little is known about the age-related changes in the brain that cause memory to start slipping.

A new institute at the University of Arizona is combining researchers from molecular biology to neurology to psychology to medicine, with the singular focus of unlocking the secrets of how the normal aging process changes the brain and contributes to memory loss. The Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, which will be formally launched with a dedication ceremony today, began with a $5 million donation from the Florida-based McKnight Brain Research Foundation, whose trustees sought out Carol A. Barnes, a Regents' Professor in psychology and neurology, for her 30-year career studying memory and aging.

Barnes, the institute's director, said the entire agenda is driven toward a good understanding of the aging process. "My contention is that we cannot possibly understand what's going wrong with the brain if we don't understand what should change," Barnes said.

Just as the normal aging process dulls eyesight and hearing, slight memory loss affects about 85 percent of people as they age, said Bruce L. McNaughton, a professor of psychology and physiology and member of the institute's science advisory board. "Understanding normal pro-cesses means eventually we'll be able to make bifocals for the brain," he said.

The correction and prevention of memory loss is just one side of the institute's goal. While the McKnight Brain Research Foundation specifically doesn't fund research on diseases like Alzheimer's or vascular dementia, a clear picture of the normal aging process will give scientists and doctors a better understanding of the abnormal changes that accompany disease.

"It would be elegant and useful to parcel out how much of memory loss is normal aging and how much of the effects are from Alzheimer's," said Dr. Geoffrey L. Ahern, professor of neurology, psychology and psychiatry. "I see a lot of children of Alzheimer's patients and they're convinced they have a disease, just because they're 50."

Normal aging problems usually center on difficulty retrieving memories, like struggling to remember people's names and the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon associated with trying to find the right word.

"It's not that it's devastating, but it certainly impacts your quality of life," Barnes said. "It's really memory that is your being." Barnes said the institute was designed to foster broad, multidisciplinary collaboration because the questions are so complex. "We're not going to advance if we keep our questions on one level. We all need each other from the molecular end to the behavioral end to the clinic," she said. "We all need insight from each of the levels to make progress."

Part of the difficulty in the research is that memory is not all the same. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different types of memories, Ahern said, whether they're recent or older, facts or personal experiences.
age at different times and differently in different people," she said. "Normal aging is a very complex problem."

As the UA's research efforts create a clearer picture of the normal process, other researchers will be able to refine their understanding of the diseases that strike the brain, Ahern said.

"People don't all of a sudden wake up with Alzheimer's one day, but where's the line between normal aging and pre-Alzheimer's signs? Nobody knows exactly where the threshold is," said Ahern, who is also on the institute's scientific board.

The McKnight Brain Research Foundation's gift of $1 million a year over five years, which required a match from the university, enables such longitudinal studies, which are expensive but necessary in the research, Barnes said.

"We're tracking people repeatedly over a period of 10 or 15 years, and that's not easily funded in typical grant cycles that run three or five years," she said. "This institute, since funding will go over multiple years, will provide stability in our research efforts. This allows us more flexibility to be as creative as possible."

Part of the long-term studies will look beyond how people lose memory as they age to people who age remarkably well and are slower to decline.

"If you knew what they did, that might be the cure right there," Ahern said. "What if they can find what's happening in normal aging and what if there's something you can take for it? What if there's something relatively simple we can fix?"

The UA's McKnight Brain Institute is the fourth in the country, following others at the University of Miami, University of Florida and University of Alabama. The McKnight Brain Research Foundation was founded in 1999 to carry on a lifelong interest in brain research, aging and memory. Evelyn McKnight spent her career as a nurse, and her husband, William Mc-Knight, was chairman of the board of the 3M Corp. for 59 years before his death in 1979.

The foundation's other institutes were founded in universities with strong research generally in neuroscience, but the UA was selected specifically because of the amount of research already under way devoted to aging and memory loss.

"Dr. Barnes specifically is an outstanding research scientist in her field, and her interest is unique among neuroscientists in that her life's work has been spent studying the influence of aging on learning and memory," said Dr. J. Lee Dockery, a trustee with the foundation and professor emeritus at the University of Florida.