USA2 SPOTLIGHT

UsAgainstAlzheimer’s co-hosts “Solutions In Focus: Preserving Brain Health In Diverse Communities” roundtable with FIU (Florida International University) on April 10, 2019. Join-in to learn about genetic and environmental linkages that impact brain diseases in Latinos and African Americans. Panelists include UsA2's Jason Resendez - providing an overview of the economic cost of AD on Latino families and UsA2's efforts to promote brain health equity; Carl Hill, Director of Special Populations at the NIA; Andrés G. Gil, Dean and Vice President for Research at FIU; Shana Burke, Assistant Professor, School of Social Work.

MUST READS

An April 2, 2019 Gates Notes blog post by Bill Gates looked at the future of technology to help predict Alzheimer’s disease. The hunt is on for a test that is cheap and easy to administer, which determines if someone has Alzheimer’s and how advanced it is. “It’s hard to overstate how important finding a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use diagnostic is for stopping Alzheimer’s... This is a miraculous age for diagnostics. As technology gets more advanced and more precise, scientists are making amazing progress in how we pinpoint disease. That deeper understanding is already benefitting Alzheimer’s research, and I’m eager to see what other game-changing diagnostics it unlocks in the years to come.”

An April 2, 2019 UCSF News Center article focused on a new study, of more than 11,000 Medicare beneficiaries, which found that providing clinicians the results of positron emission tomography (PET) scans to detect Alzheimer’s-related amyloid plaques changed medical management nearly two-thirds of the time, in patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Utilizing this technique changed diagnosis of the cause of cognitive impairment in more than one out of three cases. “These results present highly credible, large-scale evidence that amyloid PET imaging can be a powerful tool to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer’s diagnosis and lead to better medical management, especially in difficult-to-diagnose cases,” said study co-author Maria C. Carrillo, PhD.

RESEARCH AND SCIENCE  

A March 29, 2019 Medical Xpress article reported on a new clinical trial, from the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS), evaluating different home-based methods to assess cognitive function and decline in people over 75, with normal cognitive ability or Mild Cognitive Impairment. According to lead study author Mary Sano, PhD of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, “We wanted to know if we could remotely assess cognition and other outcomes using various types of technology. We needed to know this because prevention of dementia studies are long and assessing people in their home may reduce the burden of traveling to medical centers for study participants.”

EVENTS AND RESOURCES

Come-out for the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s “Care Connection Community Class: An Afternoon of Jazz” with the New York Youth Symphony playing popular songs from the 1940s and 50s. April 4, 2019 at 2pm in NYC. Register here.

Sign-up for the Dementia Action Alliance’s “Re-Imagining Dementia” conference. June 20-22, 2019 in Atlanta. Early bird rates through April 15, 2019. Register here.