Feds award Yerkes Research Center $10 million

<p>Atlanta's Yerkes National Primate Research Center has been awarded a $10 million federal grant to compare how mental abilities decline in aging humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques.</p><p>The five-year grant from the National Institute of Aging is the largest multi-year research grant ever made to the Yerkes. Yerkes _ part of Emory University _ is one of eight federally funded national primate research centers.</p><p>The study is designed to help lead to earlier diagnosis of aging-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and other forms of cognitive impairment. It will enroll about 400 women, 25 female chimps and 25 female rhesus macaques, which will all be followed over five years.</p><p>The women will undergo problem-solving and memory tests and brain scans, and the chimps and rhesus macaques will get many of the same tests, said Jim Herndon, the lead researcher on the study.</p><p>Chimps and rhesus macaques aren't known to get Alzheimer's disease. Some monkeys seem to suffer a loss in mental abilities as they get old, although this will be the first study to check for loss of cognitive abilities in chimps, Herndon said.</p><p>The researchers are focusing on women because they believe the greatest differences between people and monkeys in the loss of cognitive abilities may be seen in females. That disparity may be related to the end of menstruation, which for some monkeys doesn't happen until very old age but for women occurs not much more than halfway through life, Herndon said.</p><p>Yerkes is one of only a few centers with the resources to do such a study, said Stuart Zola, the center's director.</p><p>"With our well-established colony of chimpanzees and onsite, state-of-the-art imaging facility, Yerkes is one of but a few research centers that can undertake such an extensive aging-related study," Zola said, in a prepared statement.</p>

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