Feature Channels: Alzheimer's and Dementia

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National Institutes of Health supports education in Alzheimer’s disease at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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Leading Parkinson’s experts and advocates from around the world will gather at Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this month for Grand Challenges in Parkinson’s Disease, a scientific event highlighting the latest breakthroughs in Parkinson’s research and treatment. The 6th annual symposium will include talks from 19 scientific speakers, a poster session and extensive networking opportunities.

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A study to be published in the September 29 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry reports the use of an emerging method to identify proteins that allows two organelles, the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum, to attach to each other.

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With disease-modifying treatment trials for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) currently unsuccessful and only medications to treat symptoms available, what now? A leading neuroscientist has developed the “Dementia Prevention Initiative,” which abandons generalized ways to research and treat AD. His secret weapon: a novel “N-of-1 design” that tailors medicine down to a single patient. Instead of conducting a conventional trial of 100 people all getting the same treatment, he has switched it around and is conducting 100 single personalized trials.

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There’s no right age to switch to a geriatric specialist, but there are guidelines that can help determine whether a geriatrician – a physician who specializes in the healthcare needs of people who are aging – is the right choice for you or your loved one.

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Findings of a new and comprehensive study from FSU College of Medicine Associate Professor Antonio Terracciano and colleagues, published today in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, has found no evidence to support the idea that personality changes begin before the clinical onset of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia.

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A new role has been identified for the major Alzheimer’s risk factor ApoE4, suggesting that targeting the protein may help treat the disease. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis show that ApoE4 exacerbates the brain damage caused by toxic tangles of a different Alzheimer’s-associated protein: tau. In the absence of ApoE, tau tangles did very little harm to brain cells.

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Scientists have helped provide a way to better understand how to enable drugs to enter the brain and how cancer cells make it past the blood brain barrier.

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On Friday, Sept. 22, UCI MIND and Alzheimer’s Orange County will co-host the 28th Annual Southern California Alzheimer’s Disease Research Conference, themed “The Elephant in the Room: Sensitive Subjects in Dementia Care.” It will highlight “taboo” topics that impact the daily lives of Alzheimer’s patients and their relatives, including elder abuse, end-of-life issues, sex and intimacy, and driving risks.

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Dr. Brinton Has Pioneered a Promising Neurogenesis Therapy for Alzheimer's

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The Keck School of Medicine of USC launches a new study investigating a vaccine and oral medication to stop Alzheimer’s years before it begins

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/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Nearly 200 academic and industry researchers came together to share updates on preclinical and clinical-stage Alzheimer's disease research at the 18th Annual Conference on Alzheimer's Drug Discovery. The two-day conference, organized by the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), is the first and only to focus solely on non-amyloid drug programs in development.

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Dementia can potentially be prevented by targeting specific risk factors like education in early life, hearing in midlife, and smoking later in life, according to newly published research by the Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, Intervention, and Care. The commission, of which Johns Hopkins School of Nursing(JHSON) faculty member Laura N. Gitlin, PhD, was a member, compiled current research and emerging knowledge about dementia to develop an analysis and plan for moving forward in care.

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The simple new technique could offer vastly superior predictions of disease severity in a huge range of conditions with a genetic component, including Alzheimer’s, autism, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, schizophrenia and depression.

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Frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that is present in tens of thousands of Americans, but is often difficult to diagnose accurately. Now in a study published this week online ahead of print in Neurology, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have found evidence that a simple eye exam and retinal imaging test may help improve that accuracy.

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In new research, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have converted skin cells from healthy adults directly into motor neurons without going through a stem cell state. The technique makes it possible to study motor neurons of the human central nervous system in the lab. Unlike commonly studied mouse motor neurons, human motor neurons growing in the lab would be a new tool since researchers can’t take samples of these neurons from living people but can easily take skin samples.

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A simple scratch-and-sniff test may one day be able to help identify some people at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease up to 10 years before the disease could be diagnosed, according to a new study published in the September 6, 2017, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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Scientists have known that abnormal protein deposits and swarms of activated immune cells accumulate in brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Now researchers have untangled how these proteins and inflammation interact in lab experiments to reveal how therapies might reverse the disease process.

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Tools to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and latent tuberculosis are among the winning projects in the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) challenge, a biomedical engineering design prize competition for teams of undergraduate students. The teams developed prototypes of devices that advance technology and improve human health.

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A study led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers that tracked activity levels of 646 adults over 30 years found that, contrary to previous research, exercise in mid-life was not linked to cognitive fitness in later years.