Alzheimer's Disease

The National Institute on Aging (NIA) is currently supporting 466 active clinical trials on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD). These trials reflect diverse drug and mechanistic targets, as well as diversity in the stages of AD/ADRD they address.

The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) looks for answers to the question, "What is normal aging?" This may seem like a simple question, but for scientists, it gets to the heart of something quite complex: how to identify the true effects of aging and how to separate factors such as disease, socioeconomic disadvantage, or lack of educational opportunity from the underlying biological or other mechanisms common to human aging.

Exploring the Connection Between Down Syndrome and Alzheimer's Disease

This project involves investigations of signaling mechanisms that regulate stem cell self-renewal, neurogenesis, neurite outgrowth, synaptic plasticity and neuronal survival (Figure 3). This project has evolved from discoveries made in my laboratory during the past 3 decades which revealed roles for neurodegenerative disease-related proteins (e.g., APP, presenilin-1, DJ-1, TNF, and TLRs) in neural plasticity, and vice-versa (e.g., glutamate, BDNF and Notch).

The Clinical & Translational Neuroscience Section (CTNS), within the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience at NIA, researches the biologic basis for how Alzheimer’s disease develops in humans. The findings from some of their research studies can be found by selecting the tabs below.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk genes and measures of brain function, pathology, and the age-at-onset (AAO) of AD