A Model for Alzheimer’s Disease
A marmoset enjoys foraging for mealworms as part of her daily enrichment.
Marmosets show an age-related increase in beta amyloid deposition, tau abnormalities and dystrophic microglia in the brain, suggesting that they are a good model for studying the natural progression of AD-like neuropathology with age. Because of their short lifespan of about 10 years, we can study their behavior and cognition as they age. Importantly, our work has demonstrated that females are more vulnerable to age-related cognitive decline than males (Rothwell et al., 2022) and that cognitively impaired marmosets show accelerated brain aging (Freire-Cobo et al., 2023). Identifying behavioral and physiological markers of later pathology in male and female marmosets is crucial to our understanding of AD development in humans.
Papers on This Topic
Freire-Cobo, C., Rothwell, E.S., Varghese, M., Janssen, G.M.W., Edwards, M.E., Lacreuse, A. and Hof, P.R. (in press, 2023). Neuronal vulnerability to brain aging and neurodegeneration in cognitively impaired marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus). Neurobiology of Aging.
Rothwell, E.S., Workman, K.P., Wang, D. & Lacreuse, A. (2022). Sex differences in cognitive aging: a 4-year longitudinal study in marmosets. Neurobiology of Aging. DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2021.09.015. PMCID: PMC8841951.
Shively, C.A., Lacreuse, A., Frye, B., Rothwell, E.S. and Moro, M. (2021). Nonhuman Primates at the Intersection of Aging Biology, Chronic Disease, and Health: an Introduction to the American Journal of Primatology Special Issue on Aging, Cognitive Decline, and Neuropathology in Nonhuman Primates. American Journal of Primatology. e23309. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.23309 (Editorial). PMCID: PMC8935964
Rothwell, E.S., Freire-Cobo, C., Varghese, M., Edwards, M.*, Janssen W.G. M., Hof, P.R. & Lacreuse, A. (2021). The marmoset as an important primate model for longitudinal studies of neurocognitive aging. American Journal of Primatology, e23271. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.2327.
Freire-Cobo, C., Edler, M. K., Varghese, M., Munger, E., Laffey, J., Raia, S., In, S. S., Wicinski, B., Medalla, M., Perez, S. E., Mufson, E. J., Erwin, J. M., Guevara, E. E., Sherwood, C. C., Luebke, J. I., Lacreuse, A., Raghanti, M. A., & Hof, P. R. (2021). Comparative neuropathology in aging primates: A perspective. American Journal of Primatology, e23299. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.23299.
Lacreuse A, Raz N, Schmidtke D, Hopkins WD, Herndon JG. (2020). Age-related decline in executive function as a hallmark of cognitive ageing in primates: an overview of cognitive and neurobiological studies. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Nov 9;375(1811):20190618. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0618. Epub 2020 Sep 21. PubMed PMID: 32951543; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC7540957.