Brain Rhythms to the Rescue: Stimulation to Protect the Brain From Stress

We will use novel non-invasive brain stimulation to boost stress resilience to prevent brain atrophy that leads to Alzheimer’s disease.

Chronic stress leads to a 2-fold or more increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. We propose to use novel non-invasive brain stimulation to prevent stress-induced pathology including memory impairment, anxiety, the loss of connections between neurons, and overactive immune responses. Because this stimulation is non-invasive, it will readily translate to humans to potentially reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

This research takes an innovative conceptual approach to Alzheimer’s disease by prophylactically promoting disease resilience instead of treating disease after it develops and by using neural stimulation to achieve this.

By halting the pathological effects of chronic stress with innovative non-invasive stimulation, this research will reveal how to prevent stress-related diseases. Future research will test these findings in clinical studies.