September 01, 2016

Today's Top Alzheimer's News

USA2 SPOTLIGHT

We had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Iliff on the most recent Alzheimer’s Talks. He spoke about his research on the connection between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease, including how sleep helps clear waste from the brain. Click here for highlights of this conversation or to listen to the full conversation.


MUST READS

A September 1, 2016 Time.com article kicked off World Alzheimer’s Awareness Month with President Ronald Reagan’s open letter to the American public about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. According to the article, “In 1994, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he explained to the people of the U.S. and the world that public awareness was part of the decision not to keep the news to himself.”

An August 31, 2016 NPR.org article reported that “An experimental drug dramatically reduced the toxic plaques found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease, a team reports in the journal Nature.” According to the article, “If aducanumab works in larger studies, it could help settle a long-running debate about whether amyloid is really the root cause of Alzheimer's. This idea is known as the amyloid hypothesis.” Also reported on by The Financial Times (behind a paywall) 

An August 31, 2016 Chicago Tribune article reported that “biomedical researchers in Illinois and across the country are hoping for continued funding increases after earlier years of stagnation.” According to the article, “Nationwide, large chunks of the money this fiscal year went toward Alzheimer's research, an initiative to map the human brain and efforts to combat antibiotic resistant bacteria, among other things. Illinois researchers have received $648 million from the National Institutes of Health so far this fiscal year.” 

Notable Loss: An August 31, 2016 The Washington Post article reported that “Roger Y. Tsien, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for helping develop fluorescent markers that could tag cancer cells or track the advance of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain, died Aug. 24 in Eugene, Ore.”