Principal Investigator
Abstract

Behavioral-variant frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that involves impairments in emotional regulation, personality, and executive function and is characterized by substantial heterogeneity in rate of clinical progression. Neighborhood deprivation is associated with lower resilience to neurodegenerative disease and accelerated epigenetic aging but this has not been investigated in bvFTD. The proposed project will use data from a well-characterized clinical cohort of patients with bvFTD from the Penn Frontotemporal Degeneration Center to examine the role of deprivation on clinical progression and epigenetic aging in bvFTD. We aim to examine associations of neighborhood deprivation with clinical progression and epigenetic aging in bvFTD using linear mixed effects models and multiple regression. Using a mediation analysis, we will then investigate whether accelerated epigenetic aging mediates the association between deprivation and resilience to bvFTD. We hypothesize that higher deprivation will be related to faster clinical progression in bvFTD and that this effect will be mediated by accelerated epigenetic aging. This project will provide novel explorations of key research questions that will allow us to build a research program in which we can expand our investigations to other FTD phenotypes, examine the role of deprivation with pathological accumulation in FTD, identify the precise neuroanatomical properties implicated in FTD that are affected by deprivation, and identify critical periods in the life course for the impact of deprivation on these neuroanatomical properties.

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Award Dates
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