News

Yale School of Public Health researchers have demonstrated that stress caused by negative attitudes and beliefs toward aging can lead to pathological brain damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The research paper, the first to correlate a cultural and psychosocial risk factor to Alzheimer’s disease onset, was published online in the…

Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive deficits could be linked to reduced neuronal levels of BRCA1, a protein typically targeted in cancer research. These were the results of a study entitled “DNA repair factor BRCA1 depletion occurs in Alzheimer brains and impairs cognitive function in mice,” published in Nature Communications.

Researchers have discovered a network of nine genes that play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease onset. The study entitled “APOE*E2 allele delays age of onset in PSEN1 E280A Alzheimer’s disease” was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Alzheimer’s disease age of onset varies greatly between individuals, a phenotype…

Researchers from the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences and School of Medical Sciences and the Neuroscience Research Australia have uncovered a new molecular mechanism responsible for the loss of synapses, a key event in the early pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. The research paper, entitled “Aβ-dependent reduction of…

It is widely accepted that exercise is good for your health, but can it even increase brain cells? That is the conclusion from several new reports published in the first issue of the journal Brain Plasticity. Overall, the publications presented several pieces of compelling evidence revealing that exercise benefits the brain,…

Amyloid plaques impair astrocyte function to regulate brain vessels’ blood flow in Alzheimer’s disease. These are the findings from a study entitled “Vascular amyloidosis impairs the gliovascular unit in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease,” published in the journal Brain. In this study, the researchers investigated the role of…

University of California researchers recently showed that the targeting of a neurotransmitter involved in stress responses significantly reduced cellular and tissue damage while preventing the onset of cognitive impairment in a transgenic mice model of Alzheimer’s disease. The study, entitled “Corticotropin-releasing factor receptor-1 antagonism mitigates beta amyloid pathology…

In a new study entitled “Critical Flicker Fusion Predicts Executive Function in Younger and Older Adults,” a team of researchers developed a new device that allows for a precise assessment of an individuals’ visual processing speed, i.e., how fast can a person can understand visual information. This device is a…

Results from a recent study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health show that mean healthcare costs of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are significantly higher than of a similar age without AD, starting to increase one year before diagnosis and peaking six months after the disease…

Everyone knows that exercise is good for you, both physically and mentally. Now, a new study suggests that physical activity may not only boost brainpower, it might even prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers from St. Louis, Missouri, studied mice with an experimental form of Alzheimer’s disease and found that those mice doing the…