Researchers studying the molecular basis of long-term
potentiation (LTP) have typically focused on the role of NMDA glutamate receptor, but two papers published in the June 11 issue of Science elucidate the role of the other glutamate receptor, the AMPA receptor...
A 1997 study indicated that Alzheimer's patients who
carried one or both alleles that code for the E4 form of apolipoprotein
had more severe neurodegeneration than did patients who carried only
alleles coding for the E3 form of the protein...
Genetic testing for the ApoE allele should not be used to aid diagnosis of the sporadic form of Alzheimer's disease, concludes a Stanford University biomedical ethics committee...
The "cholinergic hypothesis" of cognition places emphasis on the role of cholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain and their projections to cortical areas...
Hopes have been raised that drugs which inhibit the proinflammatory COX-2 enzyme could be effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis and perhaps also Alzheimer's disease...
Last year Deborah Blacker, Rudolph Tanzi and their
colleagues reported finding a strong association between a deletion of exon 18 in the gene for α2 macroglobulin (A2M) and Alzheimer's disease...
Evidence from several sources suggests that the dorsal hippocampus is critical for the formation and storage of spatial information. In the long term, such information is believed to be transferred to the neocortex for storage...
The armadillo gene—so named because its mutated form in fruit flies produces a phenotype with short spiky hairs, reminiscent of those on the armadillo—codes for a protein that is a homologue of the human β-catenin...
Atherosclerotic processes are drawing the attention of some Alzheimer's researchers who point to a number of links between atherosclerotic disease and Alzheimer's disease...
At the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Toronto, Scott Small and colleagues presented data suggesting that fMRI can distinguish early AD-related memory decline from other sources of memory
decline...
In the search for the elusive γ-secretase that
cleaves β-amyloid precursor protein (APP), much attention has been paid to the protein Notch, which is critical in developmental pathways...
Three-dimensional images of enzymes at work in cells? This is the promise of a new advance in microscopy called fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM)...
Fred Van Leeuwen and his colleagues reported last year (Science 9 Jan 1998;279:242-7) that some neurons in Alzheimer's patients contain mutant RNA coding for APP and ubiquitin...
β-catenin, a protein that regulates transcription, has drawn attention in Alzheimer's research because it interacts with PS1 and PS2. It was also recently found that AD patients with the PS1 mutation have markedly reduced β-catenin...