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People with a gene variant called APOE4 have a higher risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease: APOE4 is three times more common among Alzheimer’s patients than it is among the general population. However, little is known about why this version of the APOE gene, which is normally involved in metabolism and transport of fatty molecules such as cholesterol, confers higher […]
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Similar to how protein clumps build up in the brain in people with some neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, protein clumps appear to accumulate in the diseased hearts of mice and people with heart failure, according to a team led by Johns Hopkins University researchers. In experiments described in the May 11 issue of the journal Circulation […]
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Alzheimer’s disease destroys brain cells in part by promoting the formation of insoluble clumps that contain a protein called tau. Not only are these “tau aggregates” toxic for the cells that harbor them, but they also invade and destroy neighboring brain cells, or neurons, which speeds the cognitive decline associated with the Alzheimer’s. For those reasons, Alzheimer’s researchers have been […]
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Alzheimer’s disease currently affects more than 5.5 million Americans and is one of the costliest diseases to treat, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Characterized by a buildup of plaque in the brain, few animal models exist that researchers could use to study this devastating disorder. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Missouri, publishing in PLOS ONE, developed […]
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Education gives people an edge in their later years, helping them to keep dementia at bay and their memories intact, a new USC-led study has found. “This association between the increase in college attainment and the decline in dementia prevalence is good news for people who have completed some higher education or earned a degree, but what does it mean […]
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Even one night of lost sleep may cause the brain to fill with protein chunks that have long been linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study warns. People deprived of sleep for one night experience an immediate and significant increase in beta amyloid, a substance that clumps together between neurons to form plaques that hamper the brain’s […]
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Government and other scientists are proposing a new way to define Alzheimer’s disease—basing it on biological signs, such as brain changes, rather than memory loss and other symptoms of dementia that are used today. The move is aimed at improving research, by using more objective criteria like brain scans to pick patients for studies and enroll them sooner in the […]
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The research community now has a new framework toward developing a biologically-based definition of Alzheimer’s disease. This proposed “biological construct” is based on measurable changes in the brain and is expected to facilitate better understanding of the disease process and the sequence of events that lead to cognitive impairment and dementia. With this construct, researchers can study Alzheimer’s, from its […]
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It is well known that Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, involves the accumulation of sticky proteins (plaques and tangles) in the brain. But we still don’t know what the root cause of the disease is. Given that someone, somewhere in the world, is diagnosed with dementia every three seconds, there is an urgent race to discover the […]
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