Must reads

• A February 5, 2014 Chicago Tribune article reported that "researchers at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine say AD hits hardest among the "younger elderly" -- people in their 60s and 70s -- who show faster rates of brain tissue loss and cognitive decline than AD patients 80 years and older." According to Dr. Dominic Holland, a researcher at the Department of Neurosciences at UC-San Diego, "We found that younger elderly show higher rates of cognitive decline and faster rates of tissue loss in brain regions that are vulnerable during the early stages of AD...Additionally, cerebrospinal fluid biomarker levels indicate a greater disease burden in younger than in older individuals."
• A February 4, 2014 Scientific American article posed the question: "Are “Big Brain” Projects Really Worth Billions?" According to the article, "The risk with such Manhattan-scale projects, of course, is that funds get wasted on ventures that may not yield fruit. Critics point out that the people running the big brain initiatives in the U.S. and Europe share a belief that simply harvesting data will yield understanding, when perhaps all it will yield is yet more data. There is also a danger of throwing money at projects that aren’t well thought through simply because charismatic scientists have convinced politicians worried about the vulnerability of an aging population to brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s."
• A February 3, 2014 San Francisco Gate article reported on the link between marijuana and Alzheimer's. According to the article, "A prominent professor of neuroscience, immunology and medical genetics at Ohio State University says in an recent interview that using low doses of marijuana for prolonged periods of time at some point in your life “is probably going to slow the onset or development of dementia, to the point where you’ll most likely die of old age before you get Alzheimer’s.”"
• Additional coverage of NIH's new pharmaceutical partnership to speed up development of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Notable coverage from the New York Times, The Hill, and Nature.