Study Partners

UNM Alzheimer’s Scientists Bring Mobile Brain Imaging to Zuni Pueblo

Ruddell Laconsello plopped himself in a folding chair under a tent a few steps from the long white semi-trailer parked outside a Zuni Pueblo health clinic. He was clutching a color picture of his brain.

“It was an experience,” he said, seeming slightly dazed. “The sounds are awfully loud.” The 64-year-old silversmith had just emerged from having his brain scanned inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine housed inside the trailer.

Laconsello was participating in a first-of-its-kind study conducted by the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) at The University of New Mexico. By administering cognitive screening and using the 1.5 Tesla mobile MRI scanner, UNM scientists hope to fill a gap in national Alzheimer’s disease databases relating to American Indians.

Laconsello was one of more than a dozen Zunis who volunteered to be scanned during a three-day visit in September by a team of researchers led by ADRC principal investigator Gary Rosenberg, MD, director of the UNM Center for Memory & Aging, and co-investigator Vallabh O. “Raj” Shah, PhD, Distinguished and Regents’ Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics.

MRI scanners emit loud clanging sounds while they are operating. Laconsello said he distracted himself by watching a video screen depicting fish swimming around in a tank. He decided to participate in the Alzheimer’s study in part because his late wife suffered from dementia. “She wasn’t herself anymore,” he said.

Zuni, 36 miles southwest of Gallup, is the most populous of New Mexico’s pueblos, with about 6,200 residents. Like many other American Indian communities, its residents experience unusually high levels of diabetes and kidney disease.

In the late 1990s Shah, who grew up in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat, joined other UNM faculty members in responding to a request from Zuni’s then-governor to investigate the pueblo’s kidney disease epidemic. A quarter century later, Shah is on his third Honda CRV after years of making the 320-mile round trip from Albuquerque on an almost weekly basis.

His original research into the genetic underpinnings of diabetes has evolved into related projects, like a $3.2 million federally funded initiative to help protect seniors from falling in their homes. The program is hiring community health representatives to deliver in-home physical therapy and inspect living spaces for safety features.

“We are looking to see whether they have mats in the bathroom and grab bars near the toilet,” Shah said. The grant will pay for sensor lights that come on automatically as residents move from one room to the next.

Shah has also investigated the barriers to receiving optimal care for kidney disease at Zuni and discovered that many residents had concerns about their treatment at the local Indian Health Service clinic.

He created a randomized trial in which 100 people received home visits from community health representatives for kidney care, while another 100 were seen at the clinic as usual. After a year, the home group saw marked improvement in their blood sugar and body mass index – and their quality of life improved. “Go figure,” Shah said. “Without medicine we did that.”

In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, he obtained a $379,000 supplement to a National Institutes of Health-funded study of chronic kidney disease and brought 25 Zunis to Albuquerque for cognitive and MRI testing at the Mind Research Network.