YOUTH NOW
Furrever Young
Novel studies provide clues to a longer life
On a typical weekday, Elizabeth Head spends almost seven hours watching a dozen beagles play with colored blocks.
A neuroscientist and professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Head is performing a study to see if she and her team can stave off the beagles’ cognitive decline. At the university’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, four researchers spend each week observing 45 beagles between the ages of four and eight as the dogs take 30-minute turns playing games inside a big wooden box, staring down two large, Lego-like blocks colored yellow and blue. On some days, the dogs’ job is to nudge the yellow block out of the way to reveal a treat. Then researchers reverse the task, hoping the beagles will nudge the blue block to get their tasty prize.
Beagles usually live until about age 13. Depending on how these beagles perform on learning and memory tasks over the next several years, Head will learn whether the drug they’re receiving can preserve their cognitive abilities. The drug in question, called tacrolimus is an immunosuppressant that’s approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prevent tissue rejection in organ transplant patients. Human studies have shown that transplant patients who take tacrolimus for decades tend to be…
