Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that can affect cognition, perception and behavior and is currently untreatable. It was discovered in the early 20th century and while significant scientific advancements have occurred, there is ambiguity that remains to be researched and understood. Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States and while data still needs to be uncovered, possible risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s include heart issues, poverty and obesity, age and education level, to name a few. Poverty is linked to obesity, diabetes and a low education level, which in turn have been found to have an impact on Alzheimer’s and all factors impact cardiovascular and vascular health. Due to the collectivistic culture that is deeply rooted in Latinos, there is a strong sense of family that is upheld when caring for relatives who are afflicted and may be hesitant to receive the care that is needed. Other barriers include financial stability, linguistic and cultural barriers, underutilizing resources and health literacy. There are still research gaps that are yet to be filled like brain health and longitudinal studies for Latinos, but current treatments like diet and culturally competent professionals can help with the prognosis. Alzheimer’s is a complex disease, but with the numerous efforts made thus far, such as creating the LatinosAgainstAlzheimer’s Network, it will soon be able to be understood and hopefully eradicated.

Activist burnout theory has produced minimal but meaningful literature and research that explores the dynamics of burnout culture, movement in-fighting, marginalized identities, and dimensions of burnout symptoms. Black feminist visionaries and writers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks have developed theories of love, self-care and community as central to resistance that have informed my research approach. Thus, my study aims to investigate activist burnout from a perspective that marries popular activist burnout theory with these frameworks of self-care and community. I conducted a survey of Arizona State University student organizers and activists (N=34) to address the following research questions: What are the causes and symptoms of burnout for Arizona State University activists and organizers? How have self-care and community played a role in their work and countered burnout? Can working conceptions of self-care and community serve as resistance in ways that feel meaningful to activists? The survey was broken into three dimensions: “Demographics and Experience,” “Burnout,” and “Self-Care and Community.” The results reinforced prior findings on established toxic cultures and burnout symptoms but introduced complications to working theories, such as the connections between cycles of burnout and the cyclical nature of electoral politics along with the roles of chronic and mental illness. Respondents largely demonstrated conceptions of self-care and community as resistance but also demonstrated personal and professional barriers to putting these conceptions into practice.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible brain disorder that plagues millions of people with no current cure. Current clinical research is slowly advancing to more definitive treatments in hopes of reducing the effects of progressive cognitive and behavioral decline, but none so far can slow AD’s onset. A brain area known as the nucleus incertus (NI) was recently discovered to potentially impact AD because of its connections to brain targets that degenerate; however, the NI’s role is unknown. This goal of this experiment was to use a transgenic mouse model (APP/PS1) that expresses AD pathology slowly as found in humans, and to test the mice in a variety of cognitive and anxiety assessments. Mice of both sexes and two different ages were used, with the first being young adult before AD pathology manifests (around 3-4 months old), and the second being around the cusp of when AD pathology manifests (late adult, 8-10 months old). The mice were tested in a variety of cognitive tasks that included the novel object recognition (NOR), Morris water maze (MWM), and the object placement (OP), with the latter being the focus of my thesis. Anxiety measures were taken from the open field (OF) and elevated plus maze (EPM) with the visible platform (VP) used to ensure mice could perform on the rigorous MWM task. In the OP, we found an age effect, where the older mice were less likely to explore the moved object during the OP compared to the younger mice; motor ability was unlikely to explain this effect. We did not find any significant age by genotype effects. These findings indicate that cognitive impairment only just started to affect the older cohort, since OP impairment was found on one measure and not another. Other measures currently being quantified will be helpful in understanding this data, and to see whether learning, memory, and anxiety are affected.