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Cambridge researchers created miniature brain-and-spinal-cord systems in the lab that can send signals and even trigger tiny muscle contractions. They discovered that human neurons gradually lose their ability to regrow after damage during development — but that ability can potentially be switched back on. The team identified a gene network controlling this process and found that an existing hormone drug dramatically boosted nerve fiber regrowth.

CBD may be doing far more than just easing pain or anxiety — new research suggests it could help fight Alzheimer’s disease by calming the brain’s runaway immune response. In experiments using Alzheimer’s mice, scientists found that inhaled CBD reduced key drivers of neuroinflammation, a damaging process increasingly linked to memory loss and brain degeneration.

Researchers are developing a futuristic alternative to LASIK that reshapes the eye without lasers or incisions. Using mild electrical pulses and platinum contact lenses, they temporarily soften the cornea so it can be molded into a new shape. Early tests on rabbit eyes successfully corrected nearsightedness in about a minute while preserving the eye’s structure.

For more than a century, pianists and music teachers have argued over whether a performer’s touch can actually change the tone color of a piano note — and now scientists say the answer is yes. Using a cutting-edge sensor system that tracked piano key movements at 1,000 frames per second, researchers discovered that elite pianists subtly manipulate keys in ways that listeners can genuinely hear, even if they’ve never played piano before.

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BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease neuropathology, characterised by amyloid β (Aβ) and phosphorylated-tau (p-tau) protein accumulation, has primarily been assessed with biomarkers in clinical samples of older adults. Less is known about plasma biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease neuropathology and their associations with cognitive outcomes in midlife in diverse community-based samples. Our goal was to address these gaps.

BACKGROUND: Tau PET imaging has emerged as a critical biomarker for Alzheimer's disease, informing diagnosis, staging, and therapeutic selection. We investigated whether PET tracer selection alters tau detection.

BACKGROUND: Prasinezumab has previously shown potential for reducing the progression of motor signs (Movement Disorder Society-sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale [MDS-UPDRS] Part III) in patients with early-stage Parkinson's disease who were treatment-naive or receiving monoamine oxidase type B (MAO-B) inhibitors. The aim of the PADOVA trial was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of prasinezumab in a broader population of patients receiving stable symptomatic...

Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia and among the top ten leading causes of death in high-income countries. Exponential advances in epidemiology, genetics, diagnostic imaging and fluid biomarkers, treatment, and prevention in the last decade reinforce the notion that we are entering a new era in the clinical management of Alzheimer's disease. However, far from triumphalism, this momentum should be accelerated to achieve the goals of preventing Alzheimer's disease and arresting...

Transposable elements (TEs) are implicated in aging and neurodegenerative disorders, but the impact on brain TE RNA dynamics in these phenomena is not fully understood. Therefore, we quantify TE RNA changes in aging postmortem human and mouse brains and in the neurodegenerative disorders Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease (PD). We track TE small RNAs (smRNAs) to assess the relationship to TE large RNA (laRNA) expression patterns. Human brain transcriptomes from the BrainSpan Atlas...

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Chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) is a selective lysosomal pathway essential for proteostasis and stress adaptation that declines with aging and metabolic disease, conditions closely linked to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Using genetically engineered mouse models with systemic, hepatocyte-specific, or T cell-specific deletion of the CMA regulator LAMP2A in an MYC-driven, TP53-deficient HCC context, we demonstrate that CMA exerts cell-type-dependent tumor-suppressive functions....

Speaking more than one language is hypothesized to lead to greater brain resilience in aging and Alzheimer's disease, resulting in a delay in the symptom onset of Alzheimer's disease. While previous research has used structural neuroimaging measures to explore the neural underpinnings of this protective effect, few studies have used functional brain measures. Thus, we used functional connectivity measures of resting-state fMRI data to explore the association between multilingualism and brain...

Aging is characterized by the loss of tissue homeostasis, traditionally captured by the hallmarks of aging, yet how these hallmarks integrate to drive organismal decline remains unresolved. We propose mesenchymal drift, a process in which cells progressively lose lineage identity and adopt mesenchymal features, as a convergent framework that integrates the hallmarks of aging. Accumulating evidence suggests that mesenchymal drift can both arise from and reinforce these hallmarks, forming a...

Glucocorticoids (GCs) are essential endocrine regulators coordinating stress responsiveness, metabolic flexibility, inflammatory resolution, and circadian physiology. While acute GC fluctuations are adaptive, sustained exposure (arising from psychosocial stress, circadian disruption, obesity, chronic inflammation, neoplasms, or steroid therapy) elicits pleiotropic effects that overlap with biological aging. Prolonged GC signaling intersects with multiple hallmarks of aging by altering nutrient...

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease neuropathology, characterised by amyloid β (Aβ) and phosphorylated-tau (p-tau) protein accumulation, has primarily been assessed with biomarkers in clinical samples of older adults. Less is known about plasma biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease neuropathology and their associations with cognitive outcomes in midlife in diverse community-based samples. Our goal was to address these gaps.

BACKGROUND: Tau PET imaging has emerged as a critical biomarker for Alzheimer's disease, informing diagnosis, staging, and therapeutic selection. We investigated whether PET tracer selection alters tau detection.