Texas A&M Health's Dementia & Alzheimer's Research Initiative has handed out $1.325 million in seedling grants across 11 research projects, and one of the inaugural 2026 awardees is looking at a question that touches millions of workers: what chronic disruption of the sleep-wake cycle does to the brain's immune defenses.
Karienn Souza, a research assistant professor at the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine, published work last year with collaborator David Earnest examining how circadian rhythm dysregulation during shift work may speed up cognitive aging. To probe the mechanism, her team built an animal model designed to track what happens to the brain's immune system when internal clocks are persistently out of sync with sleep and waking.
The angle matters because the brain's resident immune activity is closely tied to the inflammatory processes seen in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. If irregular schedules keep that system in a chronically altered state, it would help explain why circadian disruption shows up as a risk factor for cognitive decline - and it would point to a modifiable target rather than an unchangeable one.
The scale of the problem is what prompted Texas A&M Health and its Division of Research to launch the initiative in the first place. Roughly 55 million people worldwide live with dementia, including 7.2 million in the United States, with 10 million new cases each year and projections reaching 78 million by 2030 and 139 million by 2050. Seedling grants are early-stage funding, so Souza's work sits at the hypothesis-testing end of the pipeline rather than anywhere near clinical application.