Neurocognitive aging and the associated brain diseases impose a major social and
economic burden. Therefore, substantial efforts have been put into revealing the lifestyle,
the neurobiological and the genetic underpinnings of healthy neurocognitive aging.
However, these studies take place almost exclusively in a limited number of highly-developed
countries. Thus, it is an important open question to what extent their findings may
generalize to neurocognitive aging in other, not yet investigated regions. The purpose
of the Hungarian Longitudinal Study of Healthy Brain Aging (HuBA) is to collect multi-modal
longitudinal data on healthy neurocognitive aging to address the data gap in this
field in Central and Eastern Europe..We adapted the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers
and Lifestyle (AIBL) study of aging study protocol to local circumstances and collected
demographic, lifestyle, mental and physical health, medication and medical history
related information as well as recorded a series of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
data. In addition, participants were also offered to participate in the collection
of blood samples to assess circulating inflammatory biomarkers as well as a sleep
study aimed at evaluating the general sleep quality based on multi-day collection
of subjective sleep questionnaires and whole-night electroencephalographic (EEG)
data..Baseline data collection has already been accomplished for more than a hundred
participants and data collection in the secondsession is on the way. The collected
data might reveal specific local trends or could also indicate the generalizability
of previous findings. Moreover, as the HuBA protocol also offers a sleep study designed
for thorough characterization of participants’ sleep quality and related factors,
our extended multi-modal dataset might provide a base for incorporating these measures
into healthy and clinical aging research. .Besides its straightforward national benefits
in terms of health expenditure, we hope that this Hungarian initiative could provide
results valid for the whole Central and Eastern European region and could also promote
aging and Alzheimer’s disease research in these countries..
