Participants stretched both minds and bodies at the ‘Feast for Your Brain’ healthy aging event in September, the second annual community engagement gathering hosted by the University of Arizona’s Zuckerman College of Public Health and the Precision Aging Network.
Participants stretched both minds and bodies at the Feast for Your Brain healthy aging event. The second annual community engagement gathering, hosted by the University of Arizona’s Zuckerman College of Public Health and the Precision Aging Network (PAN), welcomed community members on Saturday, September 23 at the Health Sciences Innovation Building (HSIB) on the UArizona Health Sciences campus.
Performers, presenters, health care providers, researchers, students and volunteers joined with community visitors at the event to celebrate healthy aging. The HSIB building bustled with more than 500 participants including 35 informational tables inside and out, 11 music and dance performances on the main stage, and 13 educational presentations about brain health and public health research.
Among the presenters, two UArizona student athletes, Megan Chelf who plays soccer, and Allie Skaggs who plays softball, shared what they’ve learned about protecting their brain health starting from a young age. Audience members also enjoyed traditional music and dance from Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, and African performers and had the opportunity to participate in a brain health study in a separate quiet room.
The Feast For Your Brain event is organized to connect our Southern Arizona community with the important healthy aging research happening in the college, engage them with university and community organizations, share healthy aging practices, and invite participants to join an important brain study, MindCrowd, by playing a 10-minute online game.
The Precision Aging Network project, supported by a $60 million grant awarded to the University of Arizona in 2021 from the National Institute on Aging, is designed to identify how genetic, behavioral and other environmental factors affect the aging brain in order to improve the brain health of older adults. Together with the Precision Aging Network, UArizona’s Zuckerman College of Public Health partners with our local community to help people understand the importance of participating in research.
“We work to engage our community in research as part of our public health mission to reduce health inequity and promote health and wellness,” said Zhao Chen, PhD, MPH, professor and associate dean for research at the Zuckerman College of Public Health, “PAN-MindCrowd aims to enroll one million adults nationwide from diverse backgrounds so that we can better understand how the brain changes as we all age.”
People age differently, and age-related brain function changes are affected by many factors. Some of those factors are already understood, and others are yet to be discovered. Every research participant contributes to the collective goal of personalizing our health promotion and disease prevention approaches so we can optimize body and mind health throughout a person’s life.
About 80 attendees completed the MindCrowd game for the Precision Aging Network at this year’s event, an increase from around 50 last year! If you are curious about MindCrowd, you can join the research study and play the brain games on your own any time.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s event, and we look forward to seeing all of you and more next year!
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