Female Age-related Brain Immune Changes And Numbness

The motivation for this project is to further understand cellular mechanisms that are responsible for Female Age-related immune Changes and Numbness. The information that is available regarding immune changes in correlation to numbness is limited; this information is even more limited for the brains of females. My project investigated how immune cells in the hippocampus region of the brain contributed to neurodegeneration overtime in female rodents. The hypothesis was that increased levels of immune cells in the brain contributed to worse cognitive outcomes associated with aging. I focused on two immune cell populations, microglia and t-cells, as both can regulate brain inflammation in the hippocampus. The approach to the project was to obtain brain slices from mice, stain the slices, and quantify the amount and shape of the microglia. Viewing the microscope slide was important to visually analyze microglia and t-cells. The quantification of the microglia is still in process. Given that research would be able to find a correlation between immune changes and numbness, there could be further research about how this relationship could be mitigated to prevent aging females from experiencing increasing feelings of numbness over time.