CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2023-12-19 Conference Coverage Because frontotemporal dementia is a rare disease, it has not gotten nearly the attention or research dollars of its big cousin, Alzheimer’s. As a result, progress in the field has lagged behind, particularly with regard to biomarkers.
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-17 Research News The astonishing case of Aliria Rosa Piedrahita de Villegas captivated scientists because she was spared the wrath of her Paisa presenilin 1 mutation. She staved off dementia for three decades longer than her kin and had few neurofibrillary t
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-15 Research News The Alzheimer's disease pathological cascade unfolds in the brain over decades, amidst a menagerie of cell types reacting to change. How, and when, does each cell type contribute to the process? A study published November 30 in Nature C
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-14 Research News A person’s body does not age uniformly; instead, some parts wear out before others. A new study in the December 6 Nature online now puts numbers to this, and pins down the proteins involved. Researchers led by Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford Uni
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-14 Research News While filaments of either tau or TDP-43 underlie 90 percent of frontotemporal dementia cases, the proteopathic culprits behind the remaining 10 percent have eluded researchers. Fused in sarcoma (FUS) often forms inclusions in such cases, hen
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-11 Research News Hypertension has long been linked to cognitive impairment, but physical strain on small blood vessels in the brain might not be the only explanation. In the December 4 Nature Neuroscience, scientists led by Monica Santisteban and Costantino
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-08 Research News Akin to erratic teenagers, tau may try dozens of amyloid filament styles before settling into the stable configurations found in the brains of people with AD or other tauopathies. This is according to a study published November 29 in Nature,
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-12-07 Research News Proteins floating in the cerebrospinal fluid might do more than diagnose Alzheimer’s disease—they may identify different subtypes, according to researchers led by Betty Tijms of the Amsterdam University Medical Center and Pieter Jelle Visser
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2023-12-01 Conference Coverage The blood-based p-tau marker field is getting pretty busy. In addition to existing tests by Fujirebio, Lilly, Janssen, and Meso Scale Discovery, C2N debuted a new CLIA-approved mass spectrometry-based test last August, while ALZPath In
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2023-11-30 Conference Coverage Feel like your head is spinning? Like a little blood sample in a centrifuge, perhaps? No need to panic. It just means you are straining, like the rest of us, to keep up with the Alzheimer's disease plasma biomarker development fie
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-11-28 Research News Women are less likely to get Parkinson’s disease than men, and scientists suspect this may be thanks to estrogen. But how? By binding estrogen receptor α (ERα) at synapses and rendering α-synuclein more soluble, say Silke Nuber at Brigham an
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2023-11-28 Conference Coverage The latest effort to rewrite the diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s disease has stirred more than a little controversy. While the proposed revisions have garnered praise from researchers for more accurately reflecting the underlying b
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-11-23 Research News Lipids are the hot new thing in Alzheimer’s research, with mounting evidence linking their dysregulation to amyloidosis, especially in the presence of the APOE4 allele. Now, researchers led by David Holtzman at Washington University in St. L
RESEARCH NEWS 2023-11-22 Research News Nestled within the plasma membrane, γ-secretase trims the ends off membrane proteins. Among its 150 known substrates, none is more famous than APP. The protease chews APPs transmembrane domain to spit out Aβ peptides that aggregate into amyl
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2023-11-21 Conference Coverage When COVID forced much of the world into virtual work, dementia scientists sped up their ongoing adaptation of cognitive assessments to digital versions (Dec 2021 conference news). How are they performing now? At the Clinical Trials in