Research News

BrightFocus grantee Huaxi Xu, PhD and colleagues at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, have published a paper that sheds light on the origins and connections between the characteristic amyloid plaques found in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and the predisposition of individuals with Down syndrome to develop the same plaques, and exhibit Alzheimer’s-type dementia, as they age.

It may seem too good to be true, but your brain works better on chocolate, according to a small study just published online in the journal, Nature Neuroscience. Dark chocolate, that is. Processing for milk chocolate gets rid of the helpful compounds.

For the Alzheimer’s community, new drugs cannot come fast enough. In recent years, trials of disease-modifying drugs have been disappointing, yet they’ve brought valuable knowledge about the optimal timing for when Alzheimer’s can be stopped. Today, there’s a sense that a breakthrough is near. There’s a quantum leap of activity aimed at slowing down Alzheimer’s decades before symptoms appear.

A leading government science officer addressed BrightFocus grantees attending our annual breakfast sponsored during the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting, which was held in Washington, DC, this week.

More than 250 science journalists covered the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC, this week. Two close colleagues of BrightFocus took part in press conferences to explain new directions in Alzheimer’s research.

In the January 2015 issue of Lancet Neurology, Randall Bateman, MD, reviews top achievements in Alzheimer’s research in 2014. A long-time colleague of BrightFocus and one of our current grantees, Bateman is the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the Washington University of St. Louis Medical School.

BrightFocus 2013-14 grantee Crystal Miller, PhD, and her mentor, Bruce Lamb, PhD, both of the Cleveland Clinic, along with Taylor Jay of Case Western Reserve University, are coauthors on a new report that describes the surprising—even counterintuitive—role that a genetic variant associated with the immune system plays in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

In his blog posted on March 17, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins asks a provocative question: “What Makes Our Brains Human?” He then provides at least a partial answer to that question with the help of some new science out of Yale.