Neurosciences Clinical Trials

Category: Healthy Aging

The most recent listing of current clinical trials for Healthy Aging appears below.

Category: Healthy Aging

Studies have shown cognitive declines in healthy aging in various areas including attention, working memory, and speech communication. Common activities, such as driving a car or carrying a conversation, require focused attention on a specific task while ignoring distraction or dividing attention between several tasks.

Now, Medical College of Wisconsin researchers at Froedtert Hospital are looking at changes that occur in attention and speech perception across the lifespan. Investigating age related differences in attention will shed light on the compromised neural mechanisms involved in performing tasks that require focused or divided attention.

The study is open to healthy adults, ages 18-70, who are native English speakers with intact speech perception, and without known hearing loss, cognitive impairment, or attention deficit.

Eligible participants will be trained on an attention task involving various sounds. The training session will be followed by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session. FMRI allows researchers to obtain images of the brain while participants perform various tasks. The images show which areas of the brain are "working" the hardest. The fMRI scan does not involve radiation or injected dyes.

The studies are conducted at the Medical College during the day and into the evenings. Participants will need to come to the Medical College for two sessions, each lasting one to three hours. They will be compensated for their time.

For further details, please contact the study recruiter at (414) 456-4614 or the Investigator at msabri@mcw.edu.

Last Review Date: Feb. 10, 2010

Online Editor(s): Richard Petre