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Researchers announce new definition of Alzheimer’s disease.

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From trial-ready registries to genotyping parties, the field has developed new techniques and meds to stem a tide of failed trials. Alzforum’s 13-part series sums up the state of the art as presented at a recent conference.

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This past decade, Alzheimer’s science has undergone a paradigm shift toward the disease’s early, silent phase. For trials, this means change at every level: new participants, new screening tools, new outcome measurements. What’s the progress?

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Anyone can learn whether they carry mutations known to cause Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, and other fatal neurodegenerative diseases.

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The discovery hints that microglia, rather than neurons, may control much of a person’s genetic susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease.

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A new study shows that people with a protective Aβ mutation have less of the peptide in their blood all through their lives, likely explaining why they do not get Alzheimer's. It suggests ways to prevent the disease in the vast majority of people who don’t have the mutation.

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A founder of U.S. Alzheimer’s research, Robert D. Terry, has died at 93. He first showed what plaques and tangles look like in the electron microscope, and linked failing cognition to withering synapses in the brain.

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At a meeting in Leuven, Belgium, a coherent picture began to emerge for how fluid pockets of proteins and RNAs contribute to health and disease.

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As researchers seek cognitively normal people on the way to Alzheimer’s to fill clinical prevention trials, they face the delicate task of disclosing a highly elevated, but not certain, risk of developing the disease to thousands of people. Scientists look to cancer research for cues as they recruit for the first of such trials.

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The Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network is churning out serial data on how Alzheimer’s disease develops in a given person over many years, and at the same time transforming how therapeutic trials are being done on this disease.

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Alzforum reports some of the major highlights from the recent Keystone symposium on the role of microglia in neurodegenerative disease.

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In the past year, the Global Alzheimer’s Platform and the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia have moved quickly, and jointly, to pave the way toward more, faster, cheaper trials. Will they be better, too?

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Neurodegenerative disease researchers in the U.K. fear the Brexit will curtail their access to EU funds and complicate international collaborations. Analysts agree that a U.K. exit is likely to harm big science across the continent.

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Researchers are making progress in understanding exactly how sleep helps the brain lay down memories and remove waste products. The findings may have implications for diseases in which sleep and memory are impaired. Alzforum reports.

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In Washington, D.C., stakeholders in frontotemporal dementia came together to apply lessons learned from setbacks of Alzheimer’s drug development to the emerging field of therapy evaluation in FTD.

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Last month, scientists gathered to powwow about where we are with FTD, DLB, and cerebrovascular disorders and how best to target research dollars to them. Researchers articulated funding priorities for each of these diseases, which will inform the next bypass budget, and, hopefully, the next funding allocation.

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A free, open online course on rare forms of dementia aims to spread knowledge while harnessing social learning.

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Studies report no reduction in the amyloid-β peptide or the plaques it forms. Hints of efficacy came from four people free of the ApoE4 risk gene for AD, and one patient who was on it for nearly two years. Meanwhile, scientists uncovered a new mechanism of action for bexarotene. Researchers wonder what’s going on.

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Inhibiting the Rho kinases ROCK1 and ROCK2 with fasudil, a drug approved in China and Japan, stimulates tau autophagy in cell culture and flies.

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While regulators are trying to figure out what went wrong, independent chemists have dug into the mechanism of what may have been a "dirty" drug.