'Healthy Ageing - Ageing Brain'

Within the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), ‘Healthy Ageing’ is the primary focus of research, patient care and education & training. Healthy ageing is the lifelong process that starts before conception, with parents who pass on their genes and with them the risks and opportunities for a healthy life course, or the occurrence of illness later in life. Lifestyle, food patterns and environmental factors influence the development of health. To maintain healthy ageing, however, detailed knowledge is required about the influence of these factors, and how they interact with one another.

Research on ageing calls for a multidisciplinary approach. It extends from fundamental biological and (pre)clinical research through applied research to social-societal effects of disease and health. In this way results can be translated rapidly into adequate and/or improved prevention and treatment methods.

‘Ageing Brain’

In line with the strategy of the UMCG (‘Healthy Ageing’), research of Brain and Cognition (‘Research Institute for Neurosciences and Healthy Ageing’) is focused on ‘Ageing Brain’.  Within the ‘Ageing Brain’ programme more then 100 neuroscientists from a broad field of expertise (from basic to clinical research fields) are active, performing multidisciplinary and translational research on the normal processes of ageing and the pathophysiological mechanisms of (acute) psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.