Tune in this Friday, July 12 @ 9AM for the next episode of our monthly Facebook LIVE series, "What medications can I take to prevent or treat Alzheimer's?" This month, we're joined by Steven Tam, MD. Dr. Tam is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine and a Geriatrician at UC Irvine and recognized as a Physician of Excellence by the Orange County Medical Association. He specializes in geriatric neurology and serves as principal investigator for two Alzheimer's disease clinical trials at UCI MIND. To attend LIVE and ask Dr. Tam YOUR questions, login to Facebook this Friday morning and search @UCIrvineMIND to view the video…
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Contributed by Joshua Grill, PhD, Director of UCI MIND A recent report from The Economist concludes that three neurological disorders — migraine, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease — are impacting workplace productivity. Notably, all three conditions disproportionately affect women. While it is now clear that Alzheimer’s disease begins decades prior to diagnosis, the larger impact on the global economy results from the growing number of workers who are trying to balance employment as well as caregiving for a parent with the disease. More than 16 million Americans are unpaid caregivers for someone with Alzheimer’s disease and the most common caregiver is…
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Contributed by Carl W. Cotman, PhD and Nicole C. Berchtold, PhD It is increasingly recognized that exercise builds brain health. At a fundamental level, brain health and function depend on the expression of the brain’s genes, the building blocks of cells. In a recent paper that appeared in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging” (2019), Drs. Carl Cotman, Nicole Berchtold and coworkers demonstrated that in the brains of healthy older people, exercise reprograms gene expression patterns to a more youthful state, even in cognitively normal people (75-100 yrs old). Genes that were particularly targeted are those that boost cellular energy production and build…
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Facebook Live Series - ASK THE DOC: Alzheimer's Research Today! This monthly series features short talks and Q&A with experts from the University of California, Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND), 1 of 32 congressionally designated Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers in the nation. Join UCI MIND on Facebook (@UCIrvineMIND) the first* Friday of every month from 9:00-9:30 AM PST to learn about advances in research to improve Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Episode 5: "Is there a blood test for Alzheimer's?" This month, we're joined by Mark Mapstone, PhD. Dr. Mapstone earned a PhD in…
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Contributed by Joan Steffan, PhD In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences, colleagues and I show that a critical regulator of the immune system - called kinase IKKbeta - helps slow the onset of Huntington’s disease (HD) in mice, and this may be due to activation of a process called autophagy. Autophagy helps cells clean out and recycle their 'trash'. Accumulation of trash can occur as we age and when disease is present, so regular cleaning enabled by autophagy is critical to maintain cellular function. In HD, brain cell autophagy fails, leading to an accumulation of harmful proteins that…
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Contributed by Joan Steffan, PhD & Leslie Thompson, PhD Results from a recent study published by Tabrizi and colleagues and Ionis/Roche Pharmaceuticals in The New England Journal of Medicine are very exciting for the Huntington’s disease (HD) patient, family, and scientific communities. The researchers showed for the first time that treatment with a huntingtin lowering drug called an antisense oligonucleotide, or ASO, is safe in HD patients. Huntingtin is the protein linked to the genetic mutation that causes HD. With these results, researchers are planning a large clinical trial to test whether ASO can reduce symptoms in HD patients. The HD community is…
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Contributed by Bryce Mander, PhD The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently required some sleep medications which are commonly used to treat insomnia to add black box warning labels. The reason for this decision is because there have been reported incidents of individuals engaging in activities that commonly occur during wakefulness during sleep while on these medications, including sleep walking, sleep driving, sleep eating, and sleep cooking. On rare occasions, these symptoms have resulted in serious injuries or life-threatening incidents, which has led to the inclusion of the black box label. The FDA has also issued a contraindication for…
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