CONFERENCE COVERAGE 2024-03-15 Conference Coverage A record 4,700 people from 70 countries attended the 18th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases, held March 5 to 9 in Lisbon, Portugal. Those who attended this hybrid meeting in person sometimes packed rooms
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-13 Research News Last year, scientists led by Tony Wyss-Coray, Stanford University, reported that Aβ induced formation of lipid droplets within human microglia, and attributed this to an uptick in a triglyceride synthesis enzyme. APOE4 aggravated lipid dropl
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-12 Research News Almost half of a person's DNA consists of retrotransposons, remnants of ancient viral infections that have jumped around the human genome. Retrotransposons are typically kept under wraps by epigenetics, but tau can unleash those restrai
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-08 Research News Enticing a reluctant FDA Advisory Committee to greenlight its drug based solely on Phase 2, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals promised, sort of, that if its ongoing Phase 3 trial returned negative results, it would voluntarily withdraw the drug. Those
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-07 Research News Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia are heterogeneous diseases that are difficult to fully model in mice. One of the more common forms is caused by hexanucleotide repeat expansion in the gene C9ORF72, which prompts both
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-05 Research News During sleep, the brain cleans itself, turning up the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through the gray matter parenchyma to wash away waste. What powers this flow? In the February 28 Nature online, researchers led by Jonathan Kipnis at Washingto
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-05 Research News The brain's metabolism starts to wane decades before Alzheimer's symptoms. Why the energy deficit? Scientists led by Andrés Norambuena and George Bloom at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, blame failure of a specific typ
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-03-01 Research News While numerous fluid markers flag brain Aβ pathology in Alzheimer’s disease, markers of neurofibrillary tangles are few and far between. Now, scientists led by Oskar Hansson at Lund University in Sweden and Juan Lantero-Rodriguez of the Univ
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-29 Research News How alike are familial and sporadic Alzheimer’s? It depends. Broadly speaking, in terms of their presymptomatic biomarker changes, the two resemble each other closely (see Feb 2024 news). In terms of what goes on inside affected cells, thing
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-29 Research News In the more than a decade since scientists at Washington University and the Mayo Clinic first proposed the now well-known curves of biomarker change over the course of Alzheimer's disease, researchers have filled in this framework with
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-29 Research News TDP-43 leads a varied life, interacting with a host of different RNAs and proteins as it shuttles from the nucleus to the cytoplasm and back. This offers this RNA-binding protein plenty of opportunities to take up with the wrong crowd. Case
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-27 Research News How does a good night’s sleep re-energize the brain? At least in fruit flies, by burning damaged lipids. So claim scientists led by Amita Sehgal at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In the February 15 Nature Neuroscience, they
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-23 Research News In the hunt for blood biomarkers that predict dementia risk, a large proteomics study has flushed out quarry both old and new. Researchers led by Jin-Tai Yu, Wei Cheng, and Jian-Feng Feng at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, analyzed plas
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-23 Research News The pathological accumulation of TDP-43 that underlies many cases of FTD, ALS, and LATE-NC has been notoriously difficult to recapitulate in mice or cultured human cells. In a paper published February 14 in Nature, scientists led by Magdalin
RESEARCH NEWS 2024-02-21 Research News Type 2 diabetes (T2D) raises a person’s risk of developing dementia by about 50 percent. Does tightly controlling blood sugar decrease that risk? Yes, according to researchers led by Eng-Kiong Yeoh and Kailu Wang at the Chinese University of