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Americans who want to assess their risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease may now order $199 genetic tests, now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed 23andMe to sell such genetic analyses directly to consumers. Besides Alzheimer’s, the Mountain View, Calif., company has received authorization for reports on Parkinson’s disease, hereditary…

New York-based Anavex Life Sciences presented data at the recent 13th International Conference on Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s Diseases in Vienna showing that its compounds binding to the sigma-1 receptor hold promise in treating Alzheimer’s disease. Besides the well-known accumulation of amyloid beta peptide and the formation of senile plaques, researchers have extensively described the…

So-called “SuperAgers” lose brain volume more slowly than their normally aging peers, protecting them from dementia, according to a new study that proves yet again that Alzheimer’s disease — like other dementias — is not an inevitable fate in predestined individuals. The study, “Rates of Cortical Atrophy in Adults 80…

AXON Neuroscience announced that AADvac1, a vaccine against tau (a protein that accumulates and forms tangles inside neurons in diverse neurodegenerative diseases) showed therapeutic potential in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in a Phase 1 study. The announcement was made by Matej Ondrus, MD, the company’s medical director, at…

Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological illnesses cost Americans about $789 billion in 2014 — a price tag that will go only up as the country’s elderly population doubles by 2050. Yet the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $5.8 billion, or 18…

ALZ-801 may be a safe and effective treatment for Alzheimer’s patients with mild disease who carry two copies of the APOE4/4 gene, results of a clinical program indicate. The results are being disclosed in four presentations by the drug’s developer, Alzheon, at the 13th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, taking…

Sangamo Therapeutics‘ gene regulation technology significantly reduced levels of tau – a protein crucial to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) – in laboratory tissue experiments and a mouse model, the company announced. Sangamo’s collaborators from the Massachusetts General Hospital Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and Harvard Medical School presented the results at the…

Mice with Alzheimer’s who are unable to produce the protein Ephexin5 have no memory problems, despite having brains littered with the amyloid beta protein that has been linked to the disease, a study reports. The finding prompted Johns Hopkins University researchers to conclude that blocking the protein, which is found…

British pharmaceutical company Neuro-Bio has received $3.2 million in financing from Los Angeles-based Kairos Ventures to continue developing a diagnostic tool for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. This tool stems from a novel approach to Alzheimer’s pioneered in 2013 by Neuro-Bio’s founder and CEO, Susan Greenfield, and her team at Oxford University. Resulting…

Transdermal (through the skin) delivery of Aricept (donepezil hydrochloride) may be as effective as the drug’s oral form, according to results of a pilot bioequivalence (BE) study conducted by Corium International. Aricept in tablet form is one of the only drugs approved for Alzheimer’s disease in the U.S. for patients…