KU Alzheimer's researchers win $3M grant - Kansas City Business Journal

Sep 26, 2013, 10:45am CDT Updated: Sep 26, 2013, 12:13pm CDT

Dr. Jeff Burns, co-director, Heartland Unit for Neuroscience Trials at the University of Kansas Medical Center

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Dr. Jeff Burns, a professor of neurology at KU Medical Center and associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center,

Researchers at The University of Kansas Medical Center ^[1] have received a $3 million grant to study whether exercise could help prevent Alzheimer's disease.

The grant is from the National Institutes of Health ^[2] and will help support a new effort called the Alzheimer's Prevention Program.

Researchers plan to enroll healthy, older adults who are deemed to be at higher risk for Alzheimer's into the program. Those participants will walk on a treadmill regularly for one year and then will undergo brain scans to see whether they then have a higher or lower risk for the disease.

"For the last 100 years, we've had to wait for somebody to die before we could look at their brain to see if the markers of Alzheimer's were present," Jeff Burns ^[3] , a professor of neurology at KU Medical Center and associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center, said in a previous interview ^[4] . "We're now able to look in the brain of people who are living and identify those changes, we think, well before the onset of memory symptoms. That gives us an opportunity to intervene and lower the risk of Alzheimer's disease, and that's what we're testing."

The Alzheimer's Disease Center is one of only 29 centers that have earned a National Institute on Aging designation.