July 20, 2020

The five-year, $3.13 million grant will deploy social-assistive robots at Ohio Living Westminster-Thurber and Chapel Hill Community in Canal Fulton near Canton for an eight-week trial. The study is aimed at curbing loneliness and apathy in older adults, especially for those with dementia.

June 18, 2020

Researchers from Vanderbilt University and The Ohio State University are teaming up to develop next-generation robotic technology that can help older adults living with forms of dementia through a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The five-year grant, totaling $3.13 million, will support research and development of robotic framework and methodologies that encourage social interaction among older adults in long term care (LTC) facilities like nursing homes and independent or assisted living facilities.

Social interaction is known to produce positive health benefits among older adults suffering from cognitive impairments including the progression to Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Conversely, without social interaction, older adults may fall victim to apathy and its ripple effects of loneliness, social isolation and cognitive decline, not to mention the stress and frustration experienced by caregivers. The effects of apathy – the lack of feeling or emotion – among the aging also manifest in the decline of physical health. The stress and anxiety that apathy can produce negatively alters heart health and blood pressure, leading to increased mortality.

Currently, 72% of all adults in LTC facilities experience apathy.

While its necessity has been made clear, there are not enough skilled or well-resourced caretakers to facilitate the kind of social interaction that the growing population of aging adults needs to thrive. By 2034, and for the first time in U.S. history, older adults (people age 65 and older) will outnumber children under age 18, presenting an impending reality that will need to be accommodated.

To address a growing population and work around the limits of caretakers and to capitalize on burgeoning technology, Nilanjan Sarkar, David K. Wilson Professor of Engineering, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and professor of mechanical and computer engineering and a multidisciplinary team of engineers, nurses, physicians and health services researchers from Vanderbilt and The Ohio State Universities explore new opportunities in robotics to facilitate social interaction between aging adults.

Sarkar’s project will be conducted jointly with Lorraine Mion, professor of nursing at The Ohio State University and former Independence Foundation Professor in nursing at the Vanderbilt School of Nursing. It will explore how socially assistive robots (SARs) – a type of assistive robot designed specifically for social interactions and capable of autonomously detecting and meaningfully responding to older adults’ attention and behavior – can effectively target and engage older adults with Alzheimer’s Disease and related cognitive impairments in LTC environments. Paul Newhouse, Jim Turner Professor of Cognitive Disorders and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, pharmacology, and medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center is also a co-Investigator for this project.

“We aim to create a better quality of life for the aging population of our society,” said Sarkar, also  Director of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Lab (RASL). “While there is no cure for dementia at this point, research shows that if we can keep people mentally engaged and active, we can possibly slow the progression of the disease and the deterioration of their overall health. Our research will help us understand how to create robots to act as a coach as well as a peer to facilitate interpersonal connections in a sustainable, meaningful way.”

“We know from research that apathy is the most common neuropsychiatric symptom in older adults with dementia and can have dire effects on both the quality of life for the patient and the emotional stability of the caregiver,” said Mion. “What we are seeking to understand is how we can improve engagement strategies using advanced-but-user-friendly robotic systems to stave off apathy and improve lives for these older adults in long-term care facilities.”

The study builds off Sarkar and Mion’s recently concluded Exploratory Research (R21) grant (NIA:1R21AG050483-01A1) during which they created and deployed Adaptive Robot-mediated Intervention Architecture (ARIA) to promote social interaction vis a vis specialized tasks that depend on human interaction and collaboration.

The foundational study will enable the researchers to address three specific aims in their current research: to improve ARIA through additional software development, to measure a reduction in apathy among older adults with cognitive impairments and mild or moderate dementia, and to identify future scalability and sustainability of SAR implementation in LTC settings.

September 10, 2019
New five-year, $5 million grant project to advance study on sensitivity to pain

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Todd Monroe, PhD, RN-BC, FNAP, FGSA, FAAN, associate professor at The Ohio State University College of Nursing, will help lead a multi-site five-year, $5 million grant project awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Institute on Aging (NIA) to advance research focused on patients with Alzheimer’s disease and cancer and their sensitivity to pain.

“This grant will study the response to experimentally-evoked thermal and pressure pain to determine if people with chronic cancer pain and Alzheimer’s disease may be at greater risk of suffering from poorly-treated pain at the end of life,” Monroe said. “This is especially important for patients with Alzheimer’s disease who also have cancers, such as prostate and breast cancer, that generally lead to very painful bone metastasis.”

The multi-site, multiple PI R01, Pain Sensitivity and Unpleasantness in People with Alzheimer’s Disease and Cancer, will be performed in close partnership with Ronald Cowan, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health from Vanderbilt University. The research builds on numerous studies that Monroe and his colleagues have conducted over the last decade, including research that concluded that patients living with more severe dementia and cancer were at greater risk for not receiving hospice services and for receiving little or no pain medication during the end of life. Last year, Monroe and his team earned a five-year, $3.3 million NIH/NIA grant to examine gender and Alzheimer’s-related differences in verbal pain reporting patterns and how they are displayed in regional and network brain function, with an aim to lead to a better understanding of how Alzheimer’s and gender impact central pain mechanisms.

Monroe, Cowan and their team hope to use the information from this research to further explore the neurobiology of pain in older adults with dementia and chronic pain, which can in turn help lead to the development and testing of interventions to better manage pain in this growing population.

October 01, 2018

The National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging (NIH/NIA) has awarded a five-year, $2.8 million R01 grant to fund the study, “Impact of Omega-3 Fatty Acid Oral Therapy on Healing of Chronic Venous Leg Ulcers in Older Adults.” The grant was awarded to Jodi McDaniel, PhD, RN, (PI), who is an associate professor and the graduate studies committee chair at The Ohio State University College of Nursing. Co-investigators include Alai Tan, MD, PhD, of the College of Nursing, and College of Medicine faculty Guibin Li, MD, PhD, Narasimham Parinandi, PhD, and Sashwati Roy, PhD.

The project addresses the global problem of chronic venous leg ulcers (CVLUs), recurring wounds causing considerable infirmity for an estimated 9.7 million people every year, mainly older adults with comorbidities. CLVUs can cause disability, hospitalization and death among older adults. The project tests a new oral nutrient therapy containing the bioactive elements of fish oil, eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid for targeting and reducing the high numbers of activated polymorphonuclear leukocytes in ulcer microenvironments that keep CVLUs “trapped” in a chronic inflammatory state and prevent healing. The project findings are expected to advance wound healing science and lead to a new low-risk adjunct oral therapy to stimulate the healing of CVLUs.

“New therapies for CVLUs are needed because standard topical therapies are often ineffective or yield only short-term healing,” the investigators stated in their proposal. The project aims to reduce the high healthcare costs associated with treatments and mitigate the negative impact CVLUs have on quality of life in aging.

Mary Beth Happ, PhD, RN, FGSA, FAAN, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Nursing stated, "Dr. McDaniel's study is the third R01 grant from the National Institute on Aging awarded to College of Nursing researchers over the past year, showing the college's deep commitment to building science to improve the health and well-being of older adults."

September 17, 2018

The National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging (NIH/NIA) has awarded a five-year, $3.3 million R01 grant to fund the study titled, “Sex Differences in Pain Reports and Brain Activation in Older Adults with Alzheimer’s Disease.” The grant was awarded to Todd Monroe, PhD, RN-BC, FNAP, FGSA, FAAN, (PI) associate professor in The Ohio State University College of Nursing.

Monroe’s interdisciplinary team will include faculty from the College of Nursing, the Departments of Neurology and Geriatrics, and the Wright Center of Innovation in Biomedical Imaging at Ohio State, as well as collaborators from Vanderbilt University.

“Older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are at risk of having their pain undertreated. We do know that healthy males and females experience pain differently. It is not known if these sex-differences extend into the AD population. This study will provide research focused on better management of pain in people with AD,” Monroe stated in the proposal. “Poorly treated pain in older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a critical public health problem and understanding sex and AD-related differences in pain function is an NIA priority area.”

The proposal stated that when compared to healthy adults, and in the presence of similarly known painful conditions, older adults with AD receive less pain medication. Reasons for this discrepancy are poorly understood. Meanwhile, inadequately treated pain negatively impacts quality of life and increases health care costs.

The research will examine how verbal pain reporting patterns in responses to acute experimental thermal pain differs between older males and females with and without AD and how these sex-differences map onto regional and network brain functional changes. The study aims to determine whether sensory (stimulus intensity) and affective (stimulus unpleasantness) responses differ by sex in people with and without AD during cutaneous thermal stimulation. Examining baseline differences in experimental thermal pain between males and females with and without AD will provide a foundation for understanding factors that may contribute to untreated pain risk, as well as for developing sex-specific novel assessment, prevention, and treatment strategies in the older population with AD.

July 12, 2017

Loren Wold, PhD, FAHA, FCVS, associate professor and director of biomedical research at The Ohio State University College of Nursing has been awarded a $3.89 million grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging (NIH/NIA) for his study entitled “Mechanisms of exposure-induced tissue functional and pathological changes in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease.” This study will be performed in collaboration with Colin Combs, department chair for biomedical sciences at University of North Dakota, and Federica del Monte, PhD, MD, associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. 

Citing statistics from the World Health Organization, the study states that exposure to ambient pollution is responsible for more than 13 million deaths annually and has been associated with cardiovascular morbidity, mortality and poorer cognitive function in the aging population. “Alzheimer dementia and heart failure are a growing plague worldwide, [and] the recognition of their combinatory triggers and potential coexistence is an alarming prospective.” The study proposes to explore the role and mechanisms by which air pollution induces the development and progression of brain and heart diseases, both of which are worsened by exposures.

“Our overall goal is to determine the time course of plaque formation in the brains and hearts of animals with Alzheimer’s, in order to potentially define a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease,” Wold said. “Recent discoveries by collaborator Dr. del Monte at Harvard Medical School (now at the Medical University of South Carolina) determined that beta-amyloid plaques, the plaques known to cause neurocognitive effects in [the hearts of] patients with Alzheimer’s disease, are also present in the brain of these patients. We are now poised to determine whether the plaques form in the heart prior to the brain.” If so, Wold and his associates hope to find a way to prevent the neurological issues associated with Alzheimer’s disease by quenching the protein aggregates in the heart before they spread to the brain.

Wold has also been funded by the NIH for his work focused on external triggers of cardiovascular disease, with special emphasis on the role of cancer cachexia and air pollution, investigating how the cardiovascular system is affected by these stressors.

At The Ohio State University, Wold is involved in training undergraduates, graduate students, medical students and postdoctoral Fellows in basic lab techniques as well as tools for effective manuscript and grant writing. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Life Sciences.