Fellowship offers freedom to study dementia

An award for almost $600,000 gives senior research fellow Dr Catherine Morgan the freedom to focus full-time on research that aims to predict dementia as early as possible.

This month, Morgan, based at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, won a Health Research Council Sir Charles Hercus health research fellowship for research on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to predict dementia in Aotearoa.

“I’ve been trying it do it part-time, so to be able to do this project full-time feels like a freedom,” says Morgan, one of a handful of MRI physicists across New Zealand.

For the next four years, she will use a significant database to try to find the strongest factors that predict when a brain is beginning to slip towards dementia.

Morgan will examine MRI scans of the brain for thousands of variables, such as structural changes to the hippocampus, an area of the brain that plays a key role in memory.

While the whole brain shrinks in people with the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus loses the most volume.

She will also analyse scans of white matter tracts and blood flow in the brain. 

AI will help determine which brain measures best predict dementia.

After gaining a masters in Medical Physics and Engineering and a PhD in Neuroimaging from King's College London, Morgan moved to New Zealand 11 years ago.

In 2016, she joined the University – serendipitous timing, because Brain Research New Zealand had just launched its largest dementia prevention research clinic at the Centre for Brain Research.

Over the past nine years, dementia prevention research clinics in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin have been collecting information about people with mild cognitive impairment.

These people have some memory loss and are at higher risk of developing dementia but are still able to perform normal daily tasks.

In contrast, dementia impacts on memory, thinking and social abilities to the point sufferers are unable to carry out ordinary tasks.

Morgan is excited to be able to sift through the results from MRIs, cognitive tests and blood samples from more than 400 people, many of whom have been observed multiple times over the past nine years.

While there are real benefits for the people with mild cognitive impairment who attend the clinics, they have also contributed to a repository of information so comprehensive it allows for research breakthroughs, says Morgan.

“There’s a wealth of data, so we’re in a unique position to be able to use that to look for the earliest changes in the brain that predict dementia.

“Then we can see if there’s something we can do to intervene earlier, before they get dementia. That could be a drug treatment or other modifiable factors that might help.”

Morgan will lead a team of five New Zealand and international researchers and clinicians on the project. Her team includes New Zealand Order of Merit recipient University of Auckland Psychology Professor Lynette Tippett and Pharmacology Professor Mike Dragunow, who is developing drugs that might be used to delay or prevent dementia.

A pilot study led by Morgan showed reduced blood flow in the brains of people with mild cognitive impairment and dementia. She plans to continue investigating the role of vascular functioning in cognitive decline and to look into the part the blood-brain barrier might play.

While the blood-brain barrier stops harmful substances from entering the brain, it is also involved in removing amyloid proteins from the brain.

These proteins are strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which makes up about 70 percent of dementia cases.

Morgan has been working on developing new types of cerebrovascular scans, which offer a three-dimensional view of blood vessels in the brain across time.

These scans on the blood-brain barrier are carried out without contrasting agents, which have traditionally incorporated the metal, gadolinium.

Patients who undergo numerous MRIs could be at risk from gadolinium buildup, so the new techniques pioneered by Morgan offer a safer alternative.

She has just finished a part-time fellowship funded by the Freemasons Foundation through the Centre for Brain Research.

This fellowship was instrumental for collecting pilot scans showing the vascular health of the brains of people with mild cognitive impairment.

This information will be combined with data from other MRI scans and assessments to open new ground in Alzheimer’s disease research.

“We’ve got this amazing data set, so now we can see who falls to dementia and who stays stable and what the earliest signs were – what was different about their brains.

“Even if we don’t find a cure for Alzheimer’s, if we can just delay the onset for a few years, that would drop the prevalence in New Zealand and globally by a huge amount,” Morgan says.