October 10, 2014

Today's Top Alzheimer's News

The Boston Globe reports on the efficacy of brain games, the need to increase medical research funding, and researchers leverage big data to identify a new Alzheimer's gene (read more). 

Must reads

  • An October 9, 2014 Boston Globe article reported on the efficacy of brain games. According to the article, "There’s intense interest — and the potential for big money — in the world of brain games. Lumosity, the San Francisco-based brain games company founded in 2005, claims 60 million users (many pay $14.95 a month, but there is also a free version of the software)…At worst, researchers say, brain games can’t hurt anything, outside of your wallet. “I’ve never heard of anyone wearing out their brain — except on drugs,” observes Dr. Benjamin Wolozin, a professor of pharmacology and neurology at Boston University. Studies touted by brain training companies can be self-serving, but they do demonstrate that games can boost things like cognitive control, response inhibition, and working memory (even if you’re not a nun). The question is, do the games make our brains better, or just better at playing the games?"
  • An October 9, 2014 The Des Moines Register opinion piece by Dr. Debra Schwinn underscored the need to invest in medical research and innovation. According to Dr. Schwinn, "Cancer. Diabetes. Stroke. Alzheimer’s. Virtually every family you know has been touched by one or more of these debilitating and all-too-common diseases...Innovative new treatments are emerging every day. And because such breakthroughs are happening here in the United States, U.S. patients are among the first to benefit…As NIH funding declines, promising new treatments and cures will go unexplored. Urgent questions will remain unanswered. As during the current Ebola epidemic, it is hard to predict when the next cure will be urgently needed…Inadequate funding for the NIH will slow the pace of biomedical research and put lives and futures at risk. Progress in the fight against costly and devastating diseases will stagnate. Economic output and global competitiveness will lag…An investment in NIH today is an investment in a healthier Iowa tomorrow and will keep America at the forefront of medicine." Dr. Schwinn is dean of the University of Iowa’s Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.
Big data
  • An October 9, 2014 Science Daily article reported that researchers leveraging big data mining have discovered a new gene linked to Alzheimer's. According to the article, "Researcher David Ashbrook and colleagues from the UK and USA used two of the world's largest collections of scientific data to compare the genes in mice and humans. Using brain scans from the ENIGMA Consortium and genetic information from The Mouse Brain Library, he was able to identify a novel gene, MGST3 that regulates the size of the hippocampus in both mouse and human, which is linked to a group of neurodegenerative diseases. The study has just been published in the journal BMC Genomics."
  • An October 9, 2014 Los Angeles Times article reported on the National Institutes of Health "awarded $32 million in grants in a bid to make huge biomedical data sets accessible to researchers the world over." According to the article, "NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said the Big Data to Knowledge, or BD2K, initiative expects to invest $656 million over the next seven years to collect, analyze, catalog and disseminate research findings, genomic analyses, imaging scans and electronic health records. Made available broadly, that mass of data would allow researchers to glean new insights to improve health, Collins said…Studies that use such data generate volumes of information that are simply too big to be transferred electronically, Thompson said. To review the whole-genome sequencing performed on 815 subjects with Alzheimer's disease recently, the researchers said they watched delivery trucks disgorge boxes and boxes of disc drives for weeks at a time."