All posts tagged: dementia prevention

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

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

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 …

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

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. …