Project 466497

Myocardial infarction (MI), which is also known as a heart attack, occurs when the blood vessels that supply oxygenated blood to certain muscles of the heart suddenly and completely clogged. The oxygenated blood is unable to reach the muscle of the heart that it is supposed to supply blood to, resulting in that certain heart muscle to die. The damage to the heart varies, but regardless the event of an MI has the potential to halt the heart from efficiently performing its job, which is bringing oxygen-rich blood around the body. An oxygen-demanding organ that the heart supplies is the brain. The brain is responsible for cognitive functions such as thinking, emotions, memory and learning. It has been found that MI survivors have difficulties in such cognitive processes but how this occurs is not well understood. It has been proposed by Liu et al. (2014) that the event of an MI can impact an oxygen-sensitive brain region called the hippocampus which is a crucial structure for cognitive functioning. My research proposal aims to answer the question, how does the event of MI in young women impact the hippocampus (a key brain structure for learning, and memory)?In order to investigate if the event of an MI does alter the structure of the hippocampus, young women (between the ages of 19 and 55 years old) that have had an MI will be compared to young women who have not had an MI, on cognitive, symptoms of depression and symptoms of anxiety assessments. These results will then be associated with brain scans of the hippocampus to see if hippocampal alterations are associated with poorer cognition and/or symptoms of mental health disorders.ReferencesLiu, C., Liu, Y., Yang, Z. (2014). Neuroscience Letters, 560, 112;116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2013.12.027