A major theme in many of the speakers is that cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease is referable to loss of specific populations of projection neurons and the breakdown of highly vulnerable neural systems, especially those involved in memory formation. There is general consensus among these speakers that these neuronal alterations occur largely indepedent of amyloid deposition.

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• Yves Christen
  Welcome and Introduction

• Heiko Braak, University of Frankfurt
  Pattern of Alzheimer's disease-related cortical lesions

• Gary Van Hoesen, University of Iowa, Iowa City
  Corticocortical and corticofugal neural systems in Alzheimer's disease

• Charles Duyckaerts, Hopital de la Salpetriere, Paris
  Plaques and tangles: Where and when

• Patrick Vermersch, INSERM, Lille
  Cortical mapping of pathological tau proteins in several neurodegenerative disorders

• Dr. Patrick Hof, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine
  Dementia as a neocortical disconnection syndrome: morphological and biochemical characterization of the vulnerable neurons

• Dick Swaab and Ahmad Salehi, Netherlands Institute for Brain Research
  Alzheimer changes in hypothalamic nuclei: Their relationship to neuronal activity and clinical symptoms

• Dora Games, Athena
  Alzheimer-type neuropathology in the PDAPP transgenic mouse

• Eliezer Masliah, University of California, San Diego
  Mechanisms of synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease

• Mark West, University of Aarhus
  Is Alzheimer's disease accelerated aging? Different patterns of age and AD-related neuronal losses in the hippocampus

• Bradley Hyman, Massachusetts General Hospital
  Anatomical basis of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease

• James Haxby, National Institute of Mental Health
  Distributed, hierarchical systems for face memory in human cortex

• Antonio Damasio, University of Iowa, Iowa City Large-scale neural models of cognition