Alzheimer’s disease & dementia

A research team has made a significant finding that sheds new light on dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB). The team was led by Associate Professor Ayako Okado-Matsumoto from the Department of Biology at Toho University in collaboration with Professor Ryuji Sakakibara from the Department of Neurology at Sakura Medical Center, and Professors Hitoshi Nukada and Soroku Yagihashi from the Department of Exploratory Medicine on Nature, Life and Man at Toho University.

About 5.5 million Americans live with dementia, requiring US$53 billion in annual medical spending on doctor visits, hospitalizations, medications, home health aides and nursing homes. But the true cost of dementia care in the U.S. is far higher because it relies heavily on unpaid care from family and friends.

A Virginia Tech study provides new insights about nieces and nephews taking care of aging relatives living with dementia.

A major new study has uncovered how everyday financial behaviors—captured in routine banking data—can signal early signs of cognitive decline and financial vulnerability in older adults, up to a decade before formal intervention.

Older adults diagnosed with dementia lose their ability to assess how well they manage their finances, according to a recent study I co-authored in The Gerontologist. In comparison, people of the same age who don’t have dementia are aware of their financial abilities—and this awareness improves over time.

Investigators in the Yale Department of Psychiatry demonstrated that females and males report different information regarding the family history of Alzheimer’s disease. In particular, the scientists observed that socioeconomic factors and cognitive abilities contribute to altering the assessment of family history of Alzheimer’s disease in large-scale studies.

Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have developed a blood test that can identify early signs of Alzheimer’s disease by measuring proteins linked to the condition. The new test, known as Penta-Plex Alzheimer’s Disease Capture Sandwich Immunoassay (5ADCSI), detects five biomarkers simultaneously, which is more than existing blood tests and runs on equipment commonly used in many laboratories.

A new USC-led study has uncovered a significant link between type 2 diabetes mellitus and cortical thickness in older adults from various populations.

In Brazil, researchers from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and collaborators from the University of São Paulo (USP) have discovered that a molecule called Hevin can reverse cognitive impairment. The study, conducted in mice, showed that this glycoprotein produced by brain cells (astrocytes) is able to increase the connections between neurons (synapses) in aged rodents and in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Difficulty finding words or the habit of substituting them with others that are similar semantically—such as knife and cutter—or phonologically—such as knife and wife—are usually the first symptoms of a type of dementia known as primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Another sign is a subtle difficulty in forming sentences, evidenced by verbal and nominal agreement errors that have never been made before, or reversal of word order, for example.