The Minnesota Women Healthy Aging Project

The Minnesota Women Healthy Aging Project is an effort to understand how the brain changes with age and why some brains are more resilient than others. Using a unique methodology, researchers are evaluating the brain status of a number of women by taking multiple, multimodal measurements and relating those measures to cognitive abilities, language skills, and genetic information. The goal is to create a comprehensive databank that will provide information by which to characterize brain status, assess changes over time, and associate them with genomic makeup, cognitive function, and language ability. The project was initiated in 2010 and is being conducted through the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System. This article describes the project, which is the first of its kind, and its progress thus far.