CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2005-03-23 Conference Coverage This is part 2 of the biomarker update from Sorrento. Picture Power Besides biochemistry and genetics, the search for early markers has focused heavily on brain imaging. Pittsburgh Compound-B (PIB) has broken new ground by lightening u
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2005-03-18 Conference Coverage If you need a reason to get off the bench and work up a sweat, consider this: Increasing physical and mental activity dramatically lowers amyloid plaque deposition in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study pres
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2005-03-17 Conference Coverage One of the surprises at the AD/PD 2005 conference held last week in Sorrento, Italy, lay in just how many groups presented new experimental therapy approaches in various stages of preclinical development. This welcome news accompanies
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2005-03-17 Conference Coverage Spooked by the pitfalls of γ-secretase drug development (see companion Sorrento story), BACE fans like to point out that their aspartyl protease may be a safer target. They take comfort in pointing out that compared to γ-secretase knoc
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2005-03-15 Conference Coverage Yesterday, the 7th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease—AD/PD 2005 for short—drew to a close in beautiful Sorrento, Italy. Nearly 1,500 scientists from 52 countries met to brush up on news and trends in resea
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-03-13 Research News Researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitoma, Japan, are reporting a new MRI-based method for identifying amyloid deposits in living brain. A group led by Takaomi Saido used a fluorine-containing amyloidophilic dye and high-
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-03-04 Research News Treatment with glutamate receptor antagonists or lithium reverses behavioral defects, memory failure, and neuroanatomical abnormalities in a Drosophila model of Fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation in huma
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-03-04 Research News Memory loss is one of the most obvious and devastating symptoms of Alzheimer disease (AD). But despite advances in researchers’ understanding of the molecular basis for memory and synaptic plasticity, they still do not understand to what ext
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-03-04 Research News Most of the neurons you have at birth will still be firing well into old age. If they weren’t, you might have trouble remembering your first love, or worse, your last. But does this stability come at a price? Because neurons don’t divide, th
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-28 Research News In a well-publicized article in the February 23, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from Spain describe changes in cannabinoid receptors in the brains of AD patients, as well as animal behavioral and in-vitro data suggest
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-28 Research News There has been considerable excitement generated by findings that statins, which lower plasma cholesterol, may help protect against Alzheimer disease (see Wolozin et al., 2000, Jick et al., 2000, and also ARF related news story that question
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-24 Research News Early in the course of Alzheimer disease, blockages in axonal traffic lead to sick axons swollen with the jumbled pile-up of traffic components. The blockages precede overt amyloid pathology in AD mouse models by a year and mark the brains o
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-21 Research News Having just brought you some news on the nurture half of the developmental equation (see ARF related news story), we flip the coin and examine a new study demonstrating the power of genetics in mental health. An article published in the Febr
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-18 Research News Scientists still have a long way to go before they can harness the immense potential of human stem cells. This week in Nature journals, three separate reports lay out some of the current problems and offer some new methodologies that might m
RESEARCH NEWS 2005-02-15 Research News When molecular biologists go “fishing,” they don’t really expect to catch any fish. Not unless you’re talking about the protein FISH, named after its five SH3 domains. In the February 22 PNAS, Irene Griswold-Prenner and colleagues from Elan