Aging research

Why do some people reach the age of 100 in a healthy condition with no signs of neurodegeneration while others do not. DBL investigates healthy aging in the context of age related diseases with partners at the Vrije University Medical Center (a.o., the 100-plus research) and the Leiden University Medical Center (a.o, the Leiden longevity study). Our research within this theme deals with novel ways in detecting genetic variants (using for example long red sequencing), modelling biases within the samples (like tissue or population differences), models to represent multivariate phenotypes (to simultaneously model various parameters to capture neurodegeneration), and new ways to associate genotype-phenotype (like burden tests or graphical models).

Overarching research questions entails:

• Are there factors that predict longevity?
• Do there exist genetic variants that protect you to neurodegenerative diseases?
• What causes neurodegeneration like Parkinson or Alzheimer?
• Can we predicting biological age instead of chronological age?