Longevity science

Humans are living longer, but for many, longevity doesn’t equal quality of life. Increasingly, the final years are marked by a steady cognitive decline where memory and personality are swallowed in dementia. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is on the rise, and there is no treatment. Worse, researchers and drug companies wrestling with the disease seem to have hit a wall.

 

Most recently, Baxter announced its Alzheimer’s treatment, Gammagard, proved ineffective at its twin goals of reducing cognitive decline and preserving cognitive abilities in a 490-patient Phase III trial. Although the trial showed some positive results in participants genetically predisposed to the disease, Baxter will discontinue current immunoglobulin studies in Alzheimer’s.

 

 

If you’re not willing to send electrical shocks through your brain – “mild” as they might be – to become smarter, here’s a much gentler option: play sounds while you sleep.

 

Researchers have found that “carefully timed” sounds, like the rise and fall of waves washing against the shore, can help people remember things that they learned the previous day.

 

 

The number of U.S. residents aged 65 and older living with Alzheimer's disease is expected to nearly triple to 13.8 million by 2050 as aging baby boomers swell the ranks of those living with the brain-wasting disease, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

 

 

Those who were hearing-impaired were 24 percent more likely to have cognitive problems than were people with normal hearing. Also, cognitive abilities declined 32 to 41 percent more quickly in those with hearing impairment than in the others. People with hearing impairment developed problems with thinking and memory skills about three years sooner than the others did.

 

 

New research in the FASEB Journal by NIH scientists suggests that a small molecule called TFP5 rescues plaques and tangles by blocking an overactive brain signal, thereby restoring memory in mice with Alzheimer’s — without obvious toxic side effects.

 

“We hope that clinical trial studies in AD patients yield an extended and a better quality of life, as observed in mice upon TFP5 treatment,” said Harish C. Pant, Ph.D., a senior researcher involved in the work from the Laboratory of Neurochemistry at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders at Stroke at the National Institutes of Health.

 

 

Rui Yang, Kazuya Terabe and colleagues at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), and the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) in Japan and at the California NanoSystems Institute/UCLA have developed “nanoionic” (processes connected with fast ion transport in all-solid-state nanoscale systems) devices capable of a broad range of neuromorphic and electrical functions.

 

 

Scientists at VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland have developed new software called PredictAD that could significantly boost the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

 

The comparative software contrasts patient’s measurements with those of other patients kept in large databases, then visualizes the status of the patient with an index and graphics.

 

The support system and imaging methods were developed by VTT and Imperial College London.

 

The researchers used material compiled in the U.S. by the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative based on the records of 288 patients with memory problems. Nearly half of them, or 140 individuals, were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease on average 21 months after the initial measurements, which is about the same as the current European average of 20 months.

 

 

There is a large body of evidence to suggest that omega-3s are beneficial for brain health and heart health. A new study evaluated omega-3 supplements and their effect on cognitive performance. The findings supported established health benefits of these supplements.

 

The researchers concluded that supplementation with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) could postpone the onset of metabolic disorders and associated declines in cognitive functioning.

By turning off an immune system transmitter in mice with an Alzheimer’s-like condition, scientists have been able to greatly reduce the accumulation of an abnormal protein known as amyloid-ß in the animals’ brains.

 

Previous studies have shown that the protein plays a central role in Alzheimer’s disease. It is hoped that the research may ultimately point the way towards a method of preventing or treating the disease in humans.

 

 

The human brain, arguably the most complex object in the known universe, is a truly remarkable power-saver: it can simultaneously gather thousands of sensory inputs, interpret them in real time as a whole and react appropriately, abstracting, learning, planning and inventing, all on a strict power budget of about 20 W. A computer of comparable complexity that uses current technology, according to IBM's own estimates, would drain about 100 MW of power.

 

Clearly, such power consumption would be highly impractical. The problem, then, begs for an entirely new approach. IBM's answer is cognitive computing, a newly coined discipline that combines the latest discoveries in the field of neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing.

 

Neuroscience has taught us that the brain consumes little power mainly because it is "event-driven." In simple terms this means that individual neurons, synapses and axons only consume power as they are activated – e.g. by an external sensory input or other neurons – and consume no power otherwise. This is however not the case with today's computers, which, in comparison, are huge power wasters.

Scientists from the University of Iowa are now claiming that by playing a specific video game, test subjects aged 50 and over were able to stop and even reverse the trend.

 

In fact, those that played a particular game showed as much as seven year's worth of cognitive improvement when retested one year after the study.

 

 

In an experiment that might seem like something only a mad scientist would conjure, researchers injected human brain cells into the brains of mice to see how it would affect the way the mice thought. It did: the mice got smarter.

 

But the cognition boosting cells weren’t neurons...

 

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) have used a new combination of neural imaging methods to discover exactly how the human brain adapts to injury.

 

When one brain area loses functionality, a “back-up” team of secondary brain areas immediately activates, replacing not only the unavailable area but also its confederates (connected areas), the research shows

 

 

We tend to think of reason and emotion as being two different things, but it turns out that there may not be a choice between the heart and the head. A University of Illinois team, led by neuroscience professor Aron Barbey, has made the first detailed 3D map of emotional and general intelligence in the brain, that shows a strong overlap of general and emotional intelligence.

 

A way to stimulate the brain’s natural defense mechanisms in people with Alzheimer’s disease has been discovered by researchers at Université Laval, CHU de Québec and pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK): a molecule known as MPL (monophosphoryl lipid A) that stimulates the activity of the brain’s immune cells.

The breakthrough opens the door to developing a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and a vaccine to prevent the illness.

 

 

Scientists say they have found a way to distinguish between different types of dementia without the need for invasive tests, like a lumbar puncture.

 

US experts could accurately identify Alzheimer's disease and another type of dementia from structural brain patterns on medical scans, Neurology reports.

Currently, doctors can struggle to diagnose dementia, meaning the most appropriate treatment may be delayed.

 

More invasive tests can help, but are unpleasant for the patient.

 

 

Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida have uncovered a toxic cellular process by which a protein that maintains the health of neurons becomes deficient and can lead to dementia.

The findings shed new light on the link between culprits implicated in two devastating neurological diseases: Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which afflicts physicist Stephen Hawking.

There is no cure for frontotemporal dementia, a disorder that affects personality, behavior and language and is second only to Alzheimer’s disease as the most common form of early-onset dementia.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have surgically implanted a pacemaker-like device into the brain of a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the first such operation in the United States.

 

The device, which provides deep brain stimulation and has been used in thousands of people with Parkinson’s disease, is seen as a possible means of boosting memory and reversing cognitive decline.

 

 

A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the Institut Pasteur, Paris has come up with a novel way to describe brain development.

 

The findings could lead to new drug designs for mental disorders such as autism-spectrum disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia.