Sex, Anxiolytics, and Psychosocial Stress: Vulnerabilities to Aging and Alzheimer’s disease
Speaker: Dr. Holly Hunsberger, Assistant Professor, Foundational Sciences and Humanities, Chicago Medical School
Dr. Hunsberger obtained her PhD in behavioral neuroscience from West Virginia University under the mentorship of Dr. Miranda Reed, where she studied glutamate’s role in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). From there, she secured a postdoctoral T32 fellowship at Columbia University with Dr. Christine Denny, where she discovered her passion for understanding women’s health throughout aging and AD. Her initial postdoc work examining sex differences in anxiety and cognitive decline in AD mice earned her a K99/R00 career transition award through the NIA. This translational work was recently published in Biological Psychiatry. Holly began a faculty position at Rosalind Franklin University in November 2021. In her independent laboratory, Holly continues to examine sex differences in AD, as well as the AD exposome, which encompasses the unique experiences of each individual, including their genetics, lifestyle, injuries, education, medications, social networks, and socioeconomic status. Each of these plays a role in disease progression and development, but it is unclear how and when this occurs. Her lab studies various external perturbations using novel behavioral and in vivo imaging techniques, as well as brain-wide microscopy.
Talk summary: This talk will focus on the AD exposome and how different environmental factors can contribute to AD risk through a sex difference lens. Dr. Hunsberger will begin discussing the sex-specific impact of anxiety on cognitive decline, and then will focus on drugs that are used to treat affective disorders and how those drugs could be harmful in AD patients. From there, she will consider novel therapeutics that could be used to treat both mood and cognitive decline. Next, she will examine how stress exacerbates anxiety and AD phenotypes and how AD male and female mice respond to different stressors. Lastly, she will talk about menopause as a risk period for developing cognitive decline, mood disorders, and dementia as a future direction.
Agenda:
12:00-12:45 pm EDT: Speaker presentation
12:45-1:00 pm EDT: Question and answer period
