All posts tagged: Alzheimer's disease

What is a ‘normal’ memory slowdown, and when should I worry?

What is a ‘normal’ memory slowdown, and when should I worry?

Published by skeptic

We all have moments of forgetfulness Craig Boylan We’ve all been there. You walk upstairs only to find yourself wondering why you bothered. You blank on an acquaintance’s name, just as you’re introducing them. Or maybe, after a frantic search, you find your car keys in the fridge of all places. Such momentary lapses of memory can be disconcerting, but they are part and parcel of getting older, and very much to be expected. “Decline in what researchers call episodic memory – what happened, where and when – is a normal part of human cognitive ageing,” says Ulman Lindenberger, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. “In most adults, decline becomes apparent in their 60s… and it affects all stages of memory, from the encoding of new events over consolidation to retention and recall.” This is largely explained by structural and functional changes to the brain that begin in middle age and accelerate from there. In a 2025 paper analysing more than 3700 “cognitively healthy” adults, Lindenberger …

Why you need to future proof your brain in middle age and how to start

Why you need to future proof your brain in middle age and how to start

Published by skeptic

To chart how our brains change over the course of our lives, neuroscientists have focused largely on beginnings and endings: the rapid development and pruning of neural connections in childhood and adolescence, and the degeneration associated with old age. “We kind of skipped over middle age,” says Sebastian Dohm-Hansen, a bioinformatician at University College Cork in Ireland. There are good reasons for that, not least that changes in brain structure and function are easier to spot with neuroimaging when they are at their most extreme. In the case of cognitive decline and dementia, “a lot of what we care about presents most dramatically after the age of 60”, says Dohm-Hansen. But over the past few years, researchers have started to look more closely at the middle-aged brain, identifying a series of subtle but significant changes between the ages of 40 and 65 that mark it out as a vital time to identify problems that won’t manifest until later in life. “Think of midlife as the top of an inverted U-curve,” says Ahmad Hariri, a professor of neuroscience at Duke University …

Columbia University researchers discover new clues to Alzheimer’s origins

Columbia University researchers discover new clues to Alzheimer’s origins

Published by Jenni Sidey

A fragile cleanup system sitting on the surface of brain cells may help explain one of Alzheimer’s disease’s oldest mysteries. It may reveal how ordinary tau protein first turns into the twisted filaments tied to memory loss and cognitive decline. That is the central finding from a Columbia University team that traced the earliest stages of tau damage to a neuron-specific protein disposal system called the neuroproteasome. When that system was disrupted, tau rapidly misfolded into paired helical filaments. This is the same broad kind of abnormal structure seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. The work points to a possible starting point for tau pathology. Additionally, it connects two of the disease’s biggest risk factors: aging and the APOE4 gene variant. “These prior studies could not capture how tau misfolds in the first place in Alzheimer’s disease but understanding how tau aggregation begins is critical if we want to create therapies that prevent neurodegeneration before it starts,” says the study’s senior author, Kapil Ramachandran, assistant professor of neurological sciences at Columbia University. …

Huge study of Alzheimer’s genetics identifies new drug targets

Huge study of Alzheimer’s genetics identifies new drug targets

Published by skeptic

Illustration of amyloid plaques, which build up around brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease JUAN GAERTNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy The biggest genetic study of Alzheimer’s disease so far has identified 127 gene locations that are associated with the condition, of which 48 are new. The study also pinpoints several genes that could be prioritised as drug targets and cell types linked to a higher genetic risk of the condition. “It’s an exciting time for Alzheimer’s genetics,” says Rudolph Tanzi at Massachusetts General Hospital, who provided evidence of the first Alzheimer’s-linked gene, APP, in 1987. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, is highly heritable, with twin studies showing genetics can account for about 60 to 80 per cent of a person’s risk. Many genes have been found to play a role, chief among which is APOE. Inheriting one copy of a variant of this, known as APOE4, from a parent makes someone two or three times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as someone without the variant, and getting a copy of APOE4 from both parents can increase risk …

Women’s better memories may delay Alzheimer’s diagnosis by years

Women’s better memories may delay Alzheimer’s diagnosis by years

Published by skeptic

We’re learning more about how Alzheimer’s disease presents differently in men and women Maskot/Alamy Women tend to have more robust verbal memories than men, which can mask signs of early Alzheimer’s disease. This means that commonly used memory tests may fail to pick up on the condition in women, delaying their diagnosis and treatment, according to a new study. “We are starting to recognise that gender differences in Alzheimer’s is a big issue,” says Ralph Martins at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the research. Sasha Novozhilova at McGill University in Montreal and her colleagues analysed data from two large, long-term studies that conducted regular cognitive testing and brain imaging of older adults in the US and Canada, some of whom developed Alzheimer’s disease. The participants’ cognition was assessed by getting them to learn a list of 15 words that were read to them, then asking them to recall the words immediately, after being distracted with different words, and again later on. This kind of verbal memory test is commonly used …

Blood-based aging clock predicts dementia risk years before symptoms

Blood-based aging clock predicts dementia risk years before symptoms

Published by Jenni Sidey

A person’s body can age faster than the calendar suggests, and that gap may carry important clues about dementia risk. In a study of more than 220,000 UK Biobank participants, researchers at King’s College London found that people whose biological age appeared older than their chronological age were more likely to develop dementia over time. They were also more likely to develop it sooner. The pattern was especially strong for vascular dementia, a form linked to reduced blood flow in the brain. The work points to a simple idea with large consequences. Two people may be the same age on paper, but one may show signs of faster internal aging in the blood. That difference, the researchers say, could help identify people who face a greater chance of dementia before symptoms begin. “Our findings suggest that biological ageing data can help identify individuals at risk of dementia before clinical symptoms emerge,” said lead author Dr. Julian Mutz, King’s Prize Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London. “By combining …

MIT releases first AI model built to make Alzheimer’s preventable

MIT releases first AI model built to make Alzheimer’s preventable

Published by Jenni Sidey

Alzheimer’s disease often starts its work long before anyone notices a problem. That gap, sometimes stretching a decade or more before memory symptoms appear, is where a research team centered at MIT says it wants to intervene. The group has released FINGERS-7B, which it describes as the first AI foundation model built specifically to help make Alzheimer’s preventable by identifying people at risk earlier and more accurately. The model, developed by a team of AI researchers, physicians, and scientists, combines lifestyle, clinical, genomic, and proteomic data from tens of thousands of at-risk individuals. By reading those signals together, rather than one at a time, the system is designed to uncover what the team calls multi-omic biomarkers for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. Looking across many kinds of biological evidence What makes the project unusual is not just the scale of the data, but the way the model handles it. FINGERS-7B was trained to learn jointly from lifestyle information, clinical records, biomarkers, genomic data, and proteomic signals. The broader platform around it is called FINGERPRINT, which pairs the …

At-home blood and brain tests revolutionize early dementia screening

At-home blood and brain tests revolutionize early dementia screening

Published by Jenni Sidey

A blood sample small enough to come from a finger prick, paired with a set of online thinking tests, may offer a new way to sort who faces the greatest risk of dementia. This approach could do so without sending everyone into a clinic. That is the promise behind new research from the University of Exeter, published in Nature Communications. The study tested whether blood markers collected at home and mailed to a lab matched changes in memory and thinking. The answer, the team found, was yes. At least, it was well enough to suggest a practical role as a triage tool. The idea is not to diagnose dementia from your kitchen table. Instead, it is to help identify who may need a closer look, who might benefit from monitoring, and who is less likely to need follow-up right away. Professor Anne Corbett of the University of Exeter Medical School, who led the work, said: “Our previous research has shown that a finger-prick blood test can effectively be taken at home and posted to labs, …

Eating one egg a day linked to lower Alzheimer’s risk in older adults

Eating one egg a day linked to lower Alzheimer’s risk in older adults

Published by Jenni Sidey

Eggs have spent years in nutrition debates, praised for protein one moment and questioned for cholesterol the next. Now a large long-running study suggests they may also be tied to something else: a lower chance of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease later in life. Researchers at Loma Linda University Health found that adults 65 and older who ate eggs were less likely to receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis than those who rarely or never ate them. The pattern held even after the team adjusted for diet, lifestyle, and a long list of health conditions. “Compared to never eating eggs, eating at least five eggs per week can decrease risk of Alzheimer’s,” said Joan Sabaté, MD, DrPH, a professor at Loma Linda University School of Public Health and the study’s principal investigator. The analysis drew on 39,498 participants from the Adventist Health Study-2 cohort who were linked with Medicare records between 2008 and 2020. Over an average follow-up of 15.3 years, 2,858 participants were clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. That scale matters. So does the group itself. …

Man destined to get Alzheimer’s saved by accidental heat therapy

Man destined to get Alzheimer’s saved by accidental heat therapy

Published by skeptic

Doug Whitney (left, pictured with his son Brian in November 2022) is genetically predisposed to develop Alzheimer’s, but has so far dodged the condition Shelby Lum/Associated Press/Alamy A man in the US who was virtually guaranteed to get early-onset Alzheimer’s disease because of his genetics has somehow dodged it, possibly thanks to his inadvertent heat exposure while working as a mechanic in ship engine rooms. The case fits with growing evidence from studies in humans and other animals that suggest that heat therapy may protect against the condition. Doug Whitney’s family carries a variant of a gene called Presenilin 2, inherited from ancestors who have been traced back to a small, 18th-century Volga German village. Carriers of this mutation, which causes aberrant folding of proteins in the brain, almost always develop Alzheimer’s disease in their late 40s or early 50s. “My family has been devastated by this disease,” Whitney said in a press statement. “My mom had 13 brothers and sisters, and 10 died before they were 60 years old. It’s been a plague.” Despite …