Age-related cognitive decline is a significant public health concern as the population over the age of 65 continues to grow sharply, and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease continues to increase from an estimated 6 million today to 16 million by 2050. We will be faced with 50 trillion dollars in Medicare costs as the baby boomers continue to age. Advances in understanding the mechanisms that underlie age-related cognitive decline will allow for effective interventions and substantially reduce the burden on families as well as government and social programs. This is the goal of the BEACoN research group at UC Irvine.

The Biomarker Exploration in Aging, Cognition, and Neurodegeneration (BEACoN) research group was initiated in 2017 to develop biomarkers for cognitive decline. It is supported by a number of grants from the National Institute on Aging and other funding sources. The Principal Investigator of BEACoN is Dr. Michael Yassa.

The BEACoN research team combines expertise from neurobiology, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, physics, informatics, metabolomics, pathology, statistics, and computational science. Our experimental approaches include cutting-edge multimodal neuroimaging (MRI and PET), multiomics, genetics, epigenetics, salivary bioscience, fluid biomarkers, sleep EEG, actigraphy, cognitive testing and computational modeling.