Alejandra Hernandez Moyers
MIT Department: Health, Sciences and Technology
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Laura Lewis
Research Supervisors: Sydney Bailes, Stephanie Williams
Undergraduate Institution: Brown University
Hometown: Mexico City, Mexico
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Alejandra Hernández Moyers is a rising junior studying Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. She was born and raised in Mexico City, which she recommends everyone to visit! Throughout her lifelong journey with sports – dancing ballet for thirteen years, wrestling, and now practicing acrobatics – women’s health has become Ale’s passion. She is particularly interested in untangling the mechanisms behind functional hypothalamic amenorrhea, a neuroendocrine disorder affecting young females. More broadly, she is fascinated by how diseases such as depression or Alzheimer’s affect women differently than men. At Brown, she works at the Tripathi Laboratory, developing diagnostic tools for medical applications. She helped develop a device that electrically dissociates tissues into single cells, and is now focusing on organoids. This summer, she is at the Lewis Lab for Imaging Brain Dynamics, studying changes in neural dynamics with age and sex differences using fMRI and EEG data
Abstract
Sex Differences in Age-Related Cerebrospinal Fluid Flow and Brain
Structural Changes
Alejandra Hernández Moyers1, Stephanie Williams2,3, Laura D. Lewis3,4
1School of Engineering, Brown University
2Department of Neuroscience Brain, Behavior, and Cognition, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
3Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
4Institute of Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow is crucial for maintaining brain health through waste clearance. However, it is not known whether there are age-related changes in CSF flow in humans, or whether sex differences exist in these changes during aging. To address these questions, we collected structural and functional MRI imaging from young (n=34; 14 male, ages 18-40 y) and older adults (n=36; 17 male; ages 60-85 y). We found that CSF magnitude was significantly lower in healthy aging, with older adults showing a 40% reduction in task-evoked fluid magnitude compared to younger adults. Moreover, CSF flow was significantly lower in older males than in younger males, but not significantly lower in older females than in younger females. We measured CSF flow through the fourth ventricle and examined it for age-related structural changes to explain the differences in CSF flow but found no significant differences across age or sex. Similarly, we found a significant decrease in thalamic size due to age, influenced by sex. Intriguingly, the age-related effect on reduced thalamic volumes was three times larger in males than in females. Our analysis suggests that there are sex differences in age-related mechanisms that impair fluid dynamics and cause gray matter loss in the thalamus.
