For older adults, it may seem as though the die is already cast regarding their odds of developing dementia, but new research from the University of Pittsburgh has identified a dementia risk factor among older adults that should be modifiable even well into old age. The study, which draws on data collected from following hundreds […]
Strategic plan to address tuberculosis research
Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading infectious cause of death worldwide, killing roughly 1.6 million people in 2017. In the past 200 years, TB claimed the lives of more than one billion people — more deaths than from malaria, influenza, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, cholera and plague combined. Recently, the global health community has strengthened its efforts and […]
Particles surf their own waves, reveal how microbes and cells move through human body
Surf’s up for microbes swimming beside red blood cells. New calculations and experiments model for the first time how spherical particles submerged in gooey liquid travel along a flexible rubber sheet; comparable conditions are common in the human body, such as blood cells flowing through a capillary or the journeys of self-propelled microbes. (Although blood […]
Dementia symptoms peak in winter and spring, study finds
Adults both with and without Alzheimer’s disease have better cognition skills in the late summer and early fall than in the winter and spring, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine by Andrew Lim of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues. There have been few […]
Study provides 10-year risk estimates for dementia, which may help with prevention in high-risk individuals who potentially could benefit from early targeted prevention
A Danish study provides 10-year absolute risk estimates for dementia specific to age, sex and common variation in the APOE gene, which may help identify high-risk individuals who potentially could benefit from early targeted prevention. The study is published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Dementia is a major cause of disability in older adults […]
New mechanism for how ALS disease evolves
A mechanism for how the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, evolves has been discovered at Umeå University, Sweden. The discovery concerns how proteins with a defect structure spread the deformation to other proteins, according to results in a new thesis. The discovery can open up for novel pharmaceutical developments in the future. “We’ve been […]
Misfolded proteins serve as ‘inherited memory’ of toxic insults
Protein aggregates have a bad reputation in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, but in bacteria, inheritance of aggregates by daughter cells may help protect against the same toxic stresses that triggered them in parental cells, according to a new study publishing 28 August in the open access journal PLOS Biology, by Sander […]
Discovery presents treatment hope for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases
There is new hope for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases following a ground-breaking discovery made by an Australian-Chinese research collaboration. Researchers from the University of South Australia and the Third Military Medical University in China have discovered a signal pathway within cells, and also invented a potential drug that could stop degeneration […]
Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes: Hope for inhibitors against amyloid plaques: Designed peptides as potential inhibitors of amyloid plaques
Effective therapeutics to counteract the formation of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes are not yet available. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now come a little bit closer to a solution: They have described a new class of designed macrocyclic peptides that are highly potent inhibitors of amyloid […]
Brain iron levels may predict multiple sclerosis disabilities
A new, highly accurate MRI technique can monitor iron levels in the brains of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and help identify those at a higher risk for developing physical disability, according to a study published in the journal Radiology. MS is a disease that attacks three critical components of the central nervous system: the neurons […]