RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-24 Research News On October 22, Biogen stunned the Alzheimer’s field by announcing that aducanumab —presumed dead last March after failing a futility analysis—appears to have worked in one of its two Phase 3 trials, after all. Based on the results of a new a
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-24 Research News Changes in personality often become apparent just before dementia arises, but could certain traits in early life associate with dementia risk decades later? Yes, according to a study published October 16 in JAMA Psychiatry. Researchers led b
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-23 Research News A multi-institutional group, including members of the Tau Consortium, unveiled a stem cell tool kit for scientists studying primary tauopathies. In the November 12 issue of Stem Cell Reports, researchers co-led by Celeste Karch of Washington
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-18 Research News In neurodegenerative diseases, specific brain regions take the brunt of pathology and atrophy. However, differences from one patient to another make it hard to predict the precise path of progression for any one person. Now, scientists led b
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-18 Research News Why do some people age better than others? In the October 16 Nature, researchers led by Bruce Yankner at Harvard Medical School once again credit the repressor element 1-silencing transcription factor (REST). People who lived to a ripe old a
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-17 Research News Researchers for years thought that tau was a natively unstructured protein. Then how in the world do its supposedly disordered monomers give rise to the orderly stacks of tau molecules seen in tau fibrils? Using chemical cross-linkers to fre
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-17 Research News ApoE4 delivers a blow to neurons in mouse models of tauopathy but, according to a paper published October 10 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, it only does so if mice have their microglia. Researchers led by David Holtzman at Washingt
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-11 Research News Scientists in Portugal led by Julie Ribot and Bruno Silva-Santos, Universidade de Lisboa, report that a gaggle of specialized T cells hide out in the meninges of the healthy mouse brain, where they support both synaptic plasticity and short-
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-11 Research News Inflammation serves a purpose, but when it goes unchecked it can cause irreparable damage. On September 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists led by Frank LaFerla and Rodrigo Medeiros at the University of Californ
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-10 Research News While scientists can grow brain-like organoids in a culture dish, these tiny structures still lack many of the features of the real brain. Crucially, they don’t form a vascular system, which is essential for delivering oxygen to neurons deep
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-09 Research News Adenosine receptors may hasten inflammatory responses to tau pathology, according to a paper published this month in Brain. Researchers led by David Blum of the University of Lille, France, reported that in a mouse model of tauopathy, the ad
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-08 Research News As if the known universe of RNAs wasn’t vast enough, here’s a new entity: circular RNA. These rings form when the ends of a linear transcript become fastened together. Are they a result of splicing gone haywire, or do they serve a purpose? T
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-05 Research News Critics of the amyloid hypothesis point out that some people with brain amyloid are cognitively fine, thank you very much. Indeed, variability in plaque burden among cognitively normal older people, combined with typically short follow-up pe
RESEARCH NEWS 2019-10-04 Research News The human brain follows a typical aging trajectory, but diseased brains are further along, according to a paper in the September 24 Nature Neuroscience. Scientists led by Tobias Kaufmann and Lars Westlye, University of Oslo, Norway, analyzed