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UCI MIND professor, David Sultzer, MD, and other investigators show a clinical benefit of an investigational antipsychotic drug, pimavanserin in reducing behavioral symptoms related to Alzheimer’s disease.

Contributed by Joshua Grill, PhD and Jason Karlawish, MD UCI MIND Director Joshua Grill, PhD co-authored an article in Nature Reviews Neurology about the FDA’s decision on Aduhelm. Read more on this below: Since the FDA approved Aduhelm (aducanumab) on June 7, there has been considerable conversation, debate, and even backlash about the decision. It may seem difficult to keep up. Here is a recap of some of the most recent important events. The FDA granted Aduhelm what is known as “accelerated approval.” This means that the approval did not indicate that the drug has been adequately shown to benefit…

UCI School of Biological Sciences Dean Frank LaFerla is co-senior author of a study involving a new genetically engineered mouse model that, unlike its predecessors, is based on the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease. This could help lead to major strides in the fight to end this deadly disease! Dean LaFerla discusses his findings in a new podcast: https://www.bio.uci.edu/frank-laferla-podcast/

Contributed by Vivek Swarup, PhD The brain is made up of billions of cells that are tightly coordinated in complex neural circuitry and are ultimately responsible for manifesting our memories, emotions, and personalities: the very essence of being human. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorders worldwide and results in cognitive decline and memory loss, and we presently do not have effective treatments for AD. There is a pressing need to deepen our understanding of AD, and by studying how individual cells are changing in disease, or identifying those that are resilient to such changes, we…

A crucial, overlooked question on the new Alzheimer’s drug: When should patients stop taking it? STAT News – June 24, 2021 “When we enroll families in studies of treatments like aducanumab, we try to educate them that they should not expect large improvements in cognition or function,” Joshua Grill, director of the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders at the University of California, Irvine, said in an email to STAT. The drug can’t stop disease progression, only potentially slow it, a change that he warns would likely be imperceptible. “If we can’t expect families to know if the drug…

People taking drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier experienced less cognitive decline June 21, 2021 The research conducted by Daniel Nation, UCI associate professor of psychological science, and Jean Ho, a postdoctoral scholar at the UCI Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, included more than 12,800 people over the age of 50 in 14 separate studies carried out across six countries. Steve Zylius / UCI Irvine, Calif., June  21, 2021 — A large-scale meta-analysis led by University of California, Irvine researchers provides the strongest evidence yet of which blood pressure medications help slow memory loss in older adults: those that can…

“My greatest concern is around people with families with Alzheimer’s disease,” said Joshua D. Grill, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of California at Irvine. “Few can afford the financial burden in the first place, let alone the additional costs of Aduhelm.” He said the cost of an amyloid PET scan was at least $5,000. “Doctors, families, even we researchers need more guidance,” Grill said. Spinal taps offer a more affordable way of determining amyloid levels, but some patients shy away from them.

KATU News: “We all have to do more because this is about the most important medical problem we face as a society today,” said Dr. Josh Grill, a member of the AHEAD Study leadership team and director of the UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders. Grill said his AHEAD Study team is testing a new investigational treatment, examining whether they can slow slow or stop the earliest brain changes due to Alzheimer’s disease in people with a higher risk of developing the disease later in life. The team is seeking volunteers on its website: https://www.aheadstudy.org/ “All research…

MarketWatch As we age, our already limited attention span shrinks even more. So it takes extra discipline for seniors to stay curious. … Craig Stark, [professor of neurobiology and behavior], a memory researcher at University of California, Irvine, urges people who want to stay mentally sharp to “feed your brain novel information.” Curiosity can provide the impetus to gather that new information.

UCI MIND Faculty Member Christine Gall, PhD, a neuroscientist and professor of anatomy and neurobiology at UC Irvine’s School of Medicine, explains that our brains contain specialized cells, or neurons, that are responsible for sending and receiving information. Much like a circuit board in a computer, our brains create networks of neurons that transmit electrical activity when we engage in just about anything. These charges, AKA synapses, are critical for learning and memory.

Dr. Steven Tam, together with colleagues in the UCI School of Medicine’s Division of Geriatric Medicine & Gerontology at UC Irvine and Alzheimer’s Orange County are leading the effort to provide more accurate information and better resources to patients with AD and their caregivers.  To learn more, click here.                

An accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology noted that the study apparently is the first to focus on disparities related to “time to diagnosis and comprehensiveness of evaluation” of dementia. Claudia Kawas, M.D., a [professor], geriatric neurologist and researcher at the University of California, Irvine, and other authors of the editorial … point to the need for more diversity in dementia research — particularly as the aging U.S. population grows more diverse.

UCI School of Medicine Tahseen Mozaffar, MD, a professor of neurology and director of the Division of Neuromuscular Disorders and the UCI-MDA ALS and Neuromuscular Center at UCI’s School of Medicine will lead a study on sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM), which affects aging adults causing asymmetric muscle weakness and severe disability. Currently untreatable, sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM) causes muscle weakness and severe disability Irvine, CA – April 6, 2021 – The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases has awarded UCI a 5-year, $4.2 million grant to study sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM), which affects aging adults…

By the time they’re 40, most people with Down syndrome develop beta amyloid plaques in the brain — a key characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists believe this is because they have an extra copy of chromosome 21, which carries an amyloid-producing gene. Many people with Down syndrome do develop Alzheimer’s disease, but some manage to avoid the devastating neurodegenerative consequences despite having these plaques in their brains. To learn more about the connection between Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease, UCI School of Medicine researchers are spearheading a major international research effort that will follow hundreds of adults with the syndrome…

On Monday, MPR News host Kerri Miller talked to two researchers, including UCI MIND investigator Claudia Kawas, MD, about what they’re learning about living to be 100. Do you have to win the genetic lottery to live an entire century? Or could research unlock the secret to living longer and living longer well? Listen here >

The UCI professor has dedicated her career to finding answers to a rare genetic disease’s most crucial questions. An estimated 30,000 genes make up the human genome, with an individual’s entire uniqueness created by genetic mutations. From tissues and blood as well as distinctive physical features, like eye and hair color to temperament and so much more, genes are the coded instructions for building an entire person. But sometimes those instructions contain errors and genes can mutate to form many different things, including diseases. One such disease, Huntington’s disease, is a rare, inherited disease triggered by a single genetic mutation…

UCI MIND Clinical Research Director David Sultzer, MD was featured on CBS2/KCAL9 to discuss Tony Bennett’s recent Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis and how music and memory are intertwined. Watch the video above or learn more at KCAL9.   News coverage: CBS Los Angeles YouTube CBS Los Angeles OneNewsPage.us

UCI Health is home to 174 doctors honored as 2021 Physicians of Excellence by the Orange County Medical Association, more than any other health system in Orange County. Congratulations to UCI MIND faculty members, Gaby Thai, Mark Fisher, Virginia Kimonis, and Tahseen Mozaffar on this honor.

A recent report from Stanford identified the top 2% of the world’s scientists based on their publications and citations. Out of millions of published scientists, including those who have passed away, a total of 445 from UCI, including Vice Chancellor for Research Pramod Khargonekar, and 18 UCI MIND faculty made the cut. We congratulate our faculty members, listed below, on this significant achievement: Neurology & Neurosurgery: Tallie Z. Baram, MD, PhD Ruth Benca, MD, PhD Emiliana Borrelli, PhD Gregory J. Brewer, PhD Carl W. Cotman, PhD David Cribbs, PhD Mark J. Fisher, MD Christine Gall, PhD Charles Glabe, PhD Alan…

Contributed by Hal S. Stern, PhD and Frank M. LaFerla, PhD It is our pleasure to congratulate Charles Glabe, Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, on being named a 2020 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Among his achievements, Professor Glabe is being recognized for the creation of antibodies that bind to the four kinds of proteins forming the amyloid associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The process enables scientists to detect individual forms of the disease more precisely. The antibodies can be used as a screening tool and could help develop immunotherapies that slow or even prevent Alzheimer’s. Professor…

The University of California, Irvine is undertaking a five-year, multi-million dollar project to expand research on Alzheimer’s disease in people with Down syndrome. The National Institute of Health awarded a $109 million grant to the Alzheimer’s Biomarkers Consortium-Down Syndrome in late October. The international team, led by UCI principal investigators Elizabeth Head and Mark Mapstone, aims to identify biomarkers that indicate the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in adults with Down syndrome. Subscribers to the Orange County Business Journal can read more here >          

Will Biogen’s aducanumab become the first drug approved to slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease? UCI MIND faculty member and chair of UCI Statistics, Dr. Daniel Gillen, and other experts comment on ALZFORUM.

CBS: Six years after our initial report, Lesley Stahl visits surviving members of the 90+ Study and finds out what scientists have learned from following the study's participants. We're a nation living longer and longer. Over the next 30 years, the number of Americans age 90 and above is expected to triple, and an NIH-funded research study called 90+ at the University of California Irvine is trying to learn all it can right now from a group of men and women who've already managed to get there. Six years ago, we first reported on their first set of findings. Factors...

Contributed by UCI News: UCI’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping is redrawing our understanding of mechanisms underlying several common disorders by Ian Anzlowar, UCI | November 18, 2020 Thanks to Xiangmin Xu and his team at the UCI School of Medicine’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping, lazy eye, Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases could become a thing of the past. Opened earlier this year, the unit focuses on basic neuroscience research, advancing knowledge of the brain by defining mechanisms and pathways that underlie neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. “Our 30 to 40 investigators can join forces to tackle large-scale research…

“Our findings suggest that older individuals experiencing cognitive decline have relatively stable ideological preferences, but these preferences lose their connection to political policy details. Future studies conducted during an election year may shed additional light on how this group of Americans is casting their ballot,” said UCI MIND faculty member Mark Fisher, MD. Study participants were 190 members of The 90+ Study (LINK), a UCI-led longitudinal investigation of the oldest-old, who are those aged 90 and older.

FLASH radiation therapy, also called FLASH-RT, can eliminate the debilitating side effects associated with traditional radiation therapy by delivering the same dose in tenths of seconds, and can remove tumors, according to a study published in Clinical Cancer Research. … Charles Limoli, PhD, a researcher and professor of radiation oncology at University of California Irvine [said] It’s not unreasonable to expect that in 10 years, this may become a widespread option for radiotherapy patients worldwide.”

Congratulations to UCI MIND investigators, Drs. Elizabeth Head and Mark Mapstone, on earning a 5-year $100 million grant to study biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease in people with Down syndrome. The  Alzheimer’s Biomarker Consortium – Down Syndrome (ABC-DS) evolved from the longstanding contributions of Dr. Ira Lott and Eric Doran who had the insight to include older people with Down syndrome in Alzheimer’s disease research.  People with Down syndrome are at very high risk for Alzheimer disease as their extra copy of chromosome 21 leads to accelerated amyloid buildup with aging. The new grant will help researchers improve understanding of the unique disease progression…

Irvine, Calif. – October 15, 2020 – The National Institutes of Health has awarded a team of researchers, led by the University of California, Irvine’s Xiangmin Xu, PhD, a five-year, $3 million grant for a project titled, “Single-Cell Analysis of Aging-Associated 4D Nucleome in the Human Hippocampus.” Now, as part of the 4D Nucleome consortium, Xu, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology and director of the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping at the UCI School of Medicine, together with MPIs, Carl Wayne Cotman, PhD, a professor of neurology and founding director of the UCI Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia,…

More than 5 million people of all ages are living with Alzheimer’s in America and that number is expected to rise to nearly 14 million by the 2050. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s Disease is the sixth leading cause of death in this country — killing more Americans than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. However, research presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) shows clear data that improving lifestyle factors can influence the development and the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Here are eight ways to reduce your risk of this devastating disease: Add more fruits and vegetables…

In 1964, Keith Swayne, then a graduate student at UC Berkeley, went on a blind date with local school teacher Judy Kjellberg. He was head over heels, and just two weeks later, he proposed to her. Over the next 50 years, they raised a son and daughter, pursued their careers and engaged with the Orange County community through nonprofit work. Judy created the Orange County Community Foundation in 1989, laying the groundwork for it to grow into a change-maker with assets today in excess of $400 million, supporting various causes across the region. But during the final decade of their…

Considerable: “Scientists have known for a long time that inflammation is a driver of Alzheimer’s disease, but inflammation is complex and involves many factors,” said UCI MIND faculty member Dr. Frank LaFerla, dean of UCI School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where the research was conducted. “That’s why we decided to look at TOM-1.” … “You can think of TOM-1 as being like the brakes of a car, and the brakes aren’t working for people with Alzheimer’s,” LaFerla said. “This research shows that fixing the brakes at the molecular level could provide an entirely new therapeutic…

MedPage Today: Is it safe to share Alzheimer’s disease biomarker results with older adults who don’t have cognitive impairment? In the short-term at least, the answer appears to be “yes,” according to a study of Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease (A4) clinical trial candidates. Older Adults who learned they had elevated amyloid levels didn’t experience more short-term depression, anxiety, or suicidality than those who learned they didn’t have elevated amyloid, reported Joshua Grill, PhD, of University of California, Irvine, and colleagues in JAMA Neurology. … This may be the largest study to date about delivering Alzheimer’s biomarker information to cognitively unimpaired…

UCI MIND, the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders at UCI, has been awarded a $14.4 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health, to sustain critical research and education as Orange County’s only Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. The NIA funds only 32 of these centers at major academic institutions across the U.S. They conduct groundbreaking research to improve the understanding, diagnosis, care and treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. “The value of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center is immeasurable to both the campus and the community,” said Pramod…

HealthDay – July 22, 2020 Maria Corrada, a professor of epidemiology at the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders at the University of California, Irvine (UCI MIND), said, “Some of the characteristics found to be related to resistance and resilience to Alzheimer’s pathology can be changed or modified — pulse pressure, smoking, paid work and life satisfaction.” … “We believe that there are things we can do with our lifestyle that can help us maintain good cognitive health,” she said.

Contributed by UCI MIND faculty member Kei Igarashi, PhD. In a paper recently published in Neuron, our lab found for the first time that “remapping” of hippocampus place cells, a brain circuit function to distinguish distinct environments, is disrupted in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model. Our work suggests that remapping impairment is a circuit mechanism causing spatial memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. We hope that, by developing methods to reactivate remapping, we can develop new treatments for spacial memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease patients in a near future.

National Institutes of Health grant helps local researchers continue work on cause and treatment of dementia. The National Institutes of Health has awarded $14.4 million to the UCI MIND institute at UC Irvine to continue its crucial work in the study of Alzheimer’s disease, for which there remains no cure or prevention. UCI MIND, formally known as the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, is one of only 32 Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers around the country funded by the National Institute on Aging, an arm of the NIH. UC Irvine is one of the original half-dozen research centers established…

  In an accompanying editorial, [UCI MIND Professor] Elizabeth Head, PhD, of University of California Irvine, and Beau Ances, MD, PhD, of Washington University St Louis, wrote, “Fortea and colleagues noted similarities between biomarkers reflecting Alzheimer disease pathogenesis in individuals with Down syndrome and individuals with late onset and autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease. These results provide strong evidence that studies of people with Down syndrome can inform research on late-onset and autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease.” Read more here >