This study will examine the behaviors and brains of adults between the ages of 60 and 80. Our goal is to better understand changes associated with the aging process. This includes potential changes in behavior/cognition as well as potential biomarkers for these changes (i.e. biological data like DNA, brain scans or brain activity that are related to these changes). Participants in the study will complete a number of tests that measure their cognitive, language, and sensory abilities. We will collect information about their brains using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) and we will collect information about their genes using DNA extracted from blood samples. We will examine and compare the relationship between brain and behavior at 2 time points for the same 200 individuals. All data collected in this study will be stored in the Aging Brain Cohort repository study.
The purpose of this research is to assess the emotional impact on mothers of children with mitochondrial disease (MD). This study plans to compare survey responses between mothers of children with MD caused by mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variants, which are exclusively maternally inherited, and nuclear DNA variants (nDNA), which can be inherited from either parent or new in the individual (de novo). This survey also plans to assess the impact on future reproductive decisions due to the fact that reliable preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) for mtDNA variants is lacking and the transmission of mtDNA variants from mother to child is hard to predict.