Alzheimer’s

Emergency physician Chris Carpenter, MD, is conducting a study of patients in the emergency room who are older than 65 and at increased risk of having dementia. He wants to determine if referring suspected Alzheimer’s patients to an outreach agency will reduce frequent returns to the emergency department and help them remain independent longer.

A new marker of Alzheimer’s disease can predict how rapidly a patient’s memory and other mental abilities will decline after the disorder is diagnosed, Rawan Tarawneh, MD, found while a postdoctoral research associate at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The new data suggest that VILIP-1 potentially may be a better predictor of Alzheimer’s progression than other markers.

Randall Bateman, MD, had no intention of becoming a doctor when he enrolled as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. As a faculty member at the School of Medicine since 2006, Bateman now focuses his research on Alzheimer’s disease.

A sedentary lifestyle is associated with greater cerebral amyloid deposition, which is characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), among cognitively normal individuals with the ε4 allele of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A marker for Alzheimer’s disease rises and falls in the spinal fluid in a daily pattern that echoes the sleep cycle, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found. The pattern is strongest in healthy young people and reinforces a link between increased Alzheimer’s risk and inadequate sleep that had been discovered in animal models.

One of the most promising markers of Alzheimer’s disease, previously thought  only to be inside nerve cells, now appears to be normally released from nerve cells throughout life, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now, in one of the first studies of its kind, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are beginning to unravel the process by which the brain makes these everyday prognostications.

Falls and balance problems may be early indicators of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report July 17, 2011, at the Azheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Paris.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that a protein made by a key Alzheimer’s gene slows the brain’s ability to get rid of amyloid beta, the main ingredient of the amyloid plaques that characterize the devastating illness.

Higher levels of cellular chatter boosts levels of amyloid beta in the brain regions that Alzheimer’s hits first, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. Amyloid beta is the main ingredient of the plaque lesions that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. The finding may help explain why areas that are most active when the brain rests are often among the first to develop these plaques, according to the researchers.