Articles related to DEMENTIA

Frequent use of prescription meds for sleep carries an increased risk for dementia in White older adults compared with those who rarely or never used them, as described in the January issue of Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The study found no increased risk for dementia for those who took sleep medications “sometimes.”

Athira’s safety and efficacy trial, geared for 75 patients, will run with a smaller-than-planned 28 patient study population. The trial is for the small molecule fosgonimeton, an activator of the HGF/MET pathway, postulated to offer neuroprotective effects to improve brain function in patients with Parkinson’s dementia.

Yes, you read that right. According to a recent study in Scientific Reports, Chlamydia pneumoniae assaults the central nervous system by traveling up via the nose canal and into the brain. When the bacteria reach the brain, they encourage the production of amyloid beta protein, which is regarded to be a defining feature of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The presence of vitamin D in the brain and its link to improved cognitive performance in aged subjects was originally discovered by a Tufts University study. Higher vitamin D concentrations were linked to a 25% to 33% decreased risk of dementia or mild cognitive impairment in four different brain areas. Authors did note, however, that the observational nature of the study and the lack of a diverse subject population were two of its drawbacks, and there may be further explanations for the results.

Using data from nearly 450,000 people in the UK, a model that scores individuals based on a suite of variables found in combination to be highly predictive of dementia risk. These included age, low education level, sleep patterns, and comorbidities such as diabetes and cerebrovascular, cardiovascular, and respiratory disease.

Biomarkers may be used in the dementias to distinguish different aspects of the underlying pathology, detect presymptomatic pathological changes, predict decline or conversion between clinical disease states, and/or monitor disease progression and response to treatment. In this review, the authors discuss the currently available biomarkers, with a particular focus on the three most common neurodegenerative dementias: Alzheimer’s disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).