CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2003-04-11 Conference Coverage Almost exactly 100 years after Alois Alzheimer saw his first patient who complained about "having lost herself," Christian Haass and Roger Nitsch invited a panel of international opinion leaders to gather in the German Black
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-04-11 Research News In yesterday’s Sciencexpress, researchers described the most complete annotation of human chromosome 7 to date. Capitalizing on the availability of clinical and medical information from a variety of databases, Stephen Scherer, from The Hospi
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-04-09 Research News The drug memantine can benefit patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease, according to a study reported in the April 3 New England Journal of Medicine. Memantine has been used for more than a decade to treat dementia in Germa
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-04-09 Research News The hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) failed to significantly improve cognition in a small pilot trial of patients with Alzheimer's disease, according to a report in the April issue of Neurology. Funded by the National Institute on
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2003-04-07 Conference Coverage Brad Hyman, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown. Imagining the Natural History of Alzheimer’s Disease After well-deserved "thank you’s" to Yves Christen and Jacqueline Mervaillie of the IPSEN Foundation, who organized
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-04-05 Research News A paper in press in the Journal of Biological Chemistry reports that the lipid ceramide may contribute to the formation of amyloid deposits found in Alzheimer's disease patients because it stabilizes BACE, one of the enzymes that cleave
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-04-04 Research News Transplanted blood progenitor cells can help repopulate a diseased liver, but they do this by fusing with existing liver cells, as opposed to reverting to a more pluripotent stem cell identity, according to two reports published online in Na
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-04-01 Research News In today's Nature journals online, two articles provide new insights and new hope for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. In Nature Medicine, a collaboration led by Peter Heywood at Frenchay Hospital, Bristol, UK, and Clive Svend
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-30 Research News A large, collaborative group led by Julie Andersen at the Buck Institute for Research in Aging, Novato, California, demonstrates that lowering the bioavailability of iron-both systemically and in dopaminergic neurons-protects mice against ch
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-30 Research News Extending in-vitro evidence that insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE) may be involved in the clearance of the Aβ peptide, a report in the 12 March issue of PNAS finds that IDE knockout mice have higher cerebral accumulation of both Aβ and the AβPP
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-27 Research News The family of neuregulin-1 growth and differentiation factors is rapidly piquing the interest of researchers in areas ranging from schizophrenia to Alzheimer's disease. In the March 20 early online PNAS, Eva Anton, Ralf Schmid, and thei
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-26 Research News The normal role of Aβ is intimately tied up with synaptic electrophysiology. On the flip side, disturbances in the regulatory interplay between synaptic activity and AβPP processing could yield clues to a better explanation of how Aβ accumul
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-21 Research News In an advanced online publication in this week's Nature Medicine, doctors report the first autopsy of a patient enrolled in trials for the ill-fated Alzheimer's disease (AD) vaccine (see ARF related news story; also ARF news story)
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-20 Research News Researchers have used the well-established Potts model-an algorithm mathematicians and biologists use to measure how individual entities behave in relation to their neighbors-to help map the spatial organization of neurons in the brains of A
RESEARCH NEWS 2003-03-17 Research News While recent evidence suggests that astrocytes may help degrade β amyloid (see ARF related news story), a report in the March 7 online Journal of Biological Chemistry suggests they may also help produce it. Sylvain Lesné and colleagues, work