YURA Café: Healthy cognitive aging

Our featured participants will be Dr. Fran Wilkinson, our moderator, who is professor emerita of psychology, Faculty of Health and Dr. Hugh Wilson, professor emeritus of spatial and computational vision, Departments of Biology, Psychology, Mathematics, and Computer Science.  Both have been long-time researchers in York's Centre for Vision Research.  Their talk will be an overview of recent research on modifiable risk factors for healthy cognitive aging.

They will provide a brief overview of the status of the search of drugs to treat or slow cognitive decline and why this has been such a story of failures.  They will then turn to the much better news from research on those things in our lives that we can change that may lower our dementia risk -- factors about which there is now broad scientific agreement, what exactly are the brain-healthy choices, and what other factors are under study, with no clear outcome yet.

Most research on cognitive decline with age focuses on mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease -- the overlap and distinctions between Alzheimer’s and the other less common dementias will be briefly discussed.  Time for comments, questions and answers will follow.

The Zoom link for this session will be emailed to all YURA members a couple of days in advance.