The brain shrinkage due to verubecestat emerged quickly but did not worsen or cause neurodegeneration. Curiously, both verubecestat and lanabecestat dulled episodic memory and boosted verbal fluency.
The first ultrasensitive plasma test for this old marker differentiates Alzheimer’s from healthy controls and non-AD dementias. It segregates people stepwise at phases of pathogenesis down to Braak stages 1 and 2 and below amyloid PET positivity.
African Americans are likelier than non-Hispanic Caucasians to carry low-expression TREM2 variants, and less likely to carry a high-expression variant. As a result, they have less soluble TREM2 in their cerebrospinal fluid.
The fewer their meningeal lymphatic vessels, the slower treated mice clear plaques. Lymphatic dysfunction also drives microglial activation, hinting at a role in pathology.
Live imaging of mouse brain reveals that microglia quickly engulf cell bodies while astrocytes dispose of the neuron’s more distal reaches. The cleanup crew tires with age.
People who carry the ApoE4 variant are more likely to succumb to the virus. In vitro, SARS-CoV-2 infects more ApoE4 than ApoE3 brain cells. Astrocytes were activated, neurons degenerated.
Researchers unearthed 75 risk loci, 42 of them new, and nominated candidate genes for each. A polygenic risk score based on all variants predicted AD risk with high accuracy.
In seven papers, researchers presented a dazzling set of findings gleaned from 125,748 exomes and 15,708 genomes housed in a new database. Tidbits emerge on tau, LRRK2, and other proteins implicated in neurodegeneration.
As mice age, a busy receptor-mediated protein transport across the barrier wanes; inhibiting an alkaline phosphatase restores it. Meanwhile, the aging barrier becomes generally leaky to large molecules.
Behold single proteins on the move: Super-resolution microscopy of living cells suggests the infamous protease does not form complexes with other secretases in the plasma membrane—in mouse fibroblasts, that is.
Technical limitations may have misrepresented the transcriptional state of these cells, obscuring detection of their activation signature in frozen postmortem tissue from Alzheimer’s brain.