JCLL Lecture: H. Dinse

"Aging - a neuroplasticity perspective"

Hubert Dinse studied Biology, Chemistry and Physics at the Philips-University in Marburg and the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, where he obtained his PhD. After a postdoc at the Universita di Pisa, Italy, he worked as a consultant for the Battelle-Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, and as a Research Fellow at the Dept. of Zoology in Mainz. From 1988 to 1989 he was Visiting Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 1990 he is Associate Professor at the Institut für Neuroinformatik of the Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany, where he heads the Neural Plasticity Lab. Since 2006 he is Vice Chair of the Department of Cognitive Systems. His main research areas include learning, plasticity, and aging, tactile and visual perception, development of new learning protocols, and applied neuroplasticity for rehabilitation. For many years, he maintains diverse collaborative connections to major Universities and Research Laboratories throughout the world.

Aging exerts major reorganization and remodeling at all levels of brain structure and function, which is paralleled by a progressive decline of mental and physical abilities. On the other hand, it is now well-documented that age-related changes are not a simple reflection of degenerative processes, but a complex mix of plastic, adaptive and compensatory mechanisms, suggesting that brain plasticity is operational into old age. Considering the current demographic changes in many civilizations there is an urgent need for measures permitting an independent lifestyle into old age. Therefore, strategies for interventions such as training, exercising, practicing and stimulation, which make use of neuroplasticity principles, have been developed to maintain health and functional independence throughout lifespan

In this talk I will summarize from our studies in aged animals and human elderly individuals illustrating the behavioural and neural effects of aging in the sensorimotor domain. While behaviour is degraded in old age, from a phenomenological point of view, cortical alterations observed during aging often resemble those seen in young adults typically associated with learning, such as receptive field enlargement, map expansion and excitability enhancement. To explain this atypical relation it has been suggested that age-related reduction of intracortical inhibition mechanisms result in cortical processing to disintegrate. Accordingly, age-related cortical alterations are assumed to reflect specific forms of reorganization associated with aging processes, which differ qualitatively from learning-related reorganization occurring in young and adult subjects.

I will also show data from recent experiments demonstrating a remarkable efficacy of stimulation and training procedures to ameliorate cortical and behavioral age-related degradation, which corroborates that aging effects are not irreversible but treatable. These studies show, however, that elderly individuals cannot be rejuvenated. Instead, restoration of function becomes possible through the emergence of new processing strategies. This has been taken as evidence that remodeling in the aging brain occurs twice: during aging, and during treatment of age-related changes.

Selected references
Godde B, Berkefeld T, David-Jürgens M, Dinse HR (2002) Age-related changes in primary somatosensory cortex of rats: evidence for parallel degenerative and plastic-adaptive processes. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 26: 743-752

Dinse HR, Kalisch T, Ragert P, Pleger B, Schwenkreis P, Tegenthoff M (2005) Improving human haptic performance in normal and impaired human populations through unattended activation-based learning. Transaction Appl Perc 2: 71-88

Dinse HR (2006) Cortical reorganization in the aging brain. Prog Brain Res 157: 57-80

David-Jürgens M, Churs L, Berkefeld T, Zepka RF, Dinse HR (2008) Differential effects of aging on fore– and hindpaw maps of rat somatosensory cortex. PLoS ONE 3: e3399

Kalisch K, Ragert P, Schwenkreis P, Dinse HR, Tegenthoff M (2009) Human age-related decline in tactile perception is accompanied by enlargement of the hand representation in somatosensory cortex. Cerebral Cortex 19: 1530-1538.

Kattenstroth JC, Kolankowska I, Kalisch T, Dinse HR (2010) Superior sensory, motor, and cognitive performance in elderly individuals with multi-year dancing activities. Front Aging Neurosci 2:31

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