CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-26 Conference Coverage Microglia are finicky. Take them out of their normal environment and they have a personality meltdown. They dramatically change gene expression and just about turn into a different type of cell. How, then, to study human microglia in a
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-26 Research News Current health guidelines encourage people to hit the gym or go for a jog several times per week, but a new study suggests that engaging in much lighter forms of physical activity could bestow benefits upon the brain. In a paper published Ap
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-24 Research News Children with later-onset spinal muscular atrophy benefited from three years of treatment with the anti-sense oligonucleotide nusinersen, according to a paper in today’s Neurology. Motor function either improved or stabilized in kids aged 2
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-24 Conference Coverage ApoE4 impairs how the brain handles lipids. At the 14th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases, held March 27–31 in Lisbon, Portugal, researchers argued that this effect of AD’s biggest risk gene is important
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-23 Conference Coverage Much of the research on microglia in Alzheimer’s disease has focused on the TREM2 receptor (see Part 4 of this series). But other microglial receptors play a hand in age- and injury-related activation as well (e.g., Apr 2019 news on C
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-23 Conference Coverage Much of the genetic risk of Alzheimer’s disease plays out in microglia. But exactly how do risk variants change these cells? At the 14th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases, held March 27–31 in Lisbon, Port
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-21 Research News Microglia are known as the brain’s sometimes-overzealous clean-up crew, but what happens to people if these immune cells are missing from the get-go? Two studies published March 29 in the American Journal of Human Genetics describe nine peop
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-20 Conference Coverage Thirty missense mutations in amyloid precursor protein are known to cause autosomal-dominant Alzheimer’s disease. Now, scientists at Uppsala University, Sweden, have identified a deletion in the APP gene that does the same thing. At t
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-19 Research News In the April 17 Science Advances, researchers proffer a new technique for detecting plasma Aβ. Scientists led by Kyo Seon Hwang at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, and YoungSoo Kim at Yonsei University, Incheon, both in the Republic of Korea, de
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-19 Conference Coverage Next-generation genetic analysis has opened the floodgates to a wave of new gene discovery. Whole-exome and-genome sequencing have nearly doubled the number of previously known Alzheimer’s genes (see Part 1 of this story). But modern g
CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2019-04-19 Conference Coverage Genome-wide association studies have turned up some 30 loci linked to Alzheimer’s, yet GWAS still left much of the disease’s heritability unexplained. To find the remaining genes, geneticists have turned to whole-genome and whole-exome
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-18 Research News In the two years since Britain’s Dementia Research Institute was launched, the country, and with it the fledgling institute, has been tossed about by the roiling chaos of Brexit. Now, despite it all, the DRI is striking out to transform tran
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-12 Research News Chronic traumatic encephalopathy can only be formally diagnosed by examining the brain after death, but researchers are inching closer to spotting the neuropathological hallmarks of disease during life. A study published April 10 in the New
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-04-12 Research News Though all autosomal-dominant AD mutations lead to Aβ pathology, they do so by disturbing γ-secretase processing of APP in different ways. In the April 12 Molecular Psychiatry, researchers led by Selina Wray of University College London comp