CONFERENCE COVERAGE SERIES
International Conference on Alzheimer's & Parkinson's Diseases 2009
Prague, Czech Republic
11 – 15 March 2009
Prague: AD/PD Convenes Record Number of Youngsters and Leaders
Last week, neurodegenerative disease researchers from all over the world began a bustling six days of talks, posters, and ample exchange...
Prague: What Say You, Alois—Should It Be “Alzheimer-Fischer” Disease?
The 9th International AD/PD conference, held in Prague 11-15 March, made a big splash in the otherwise sleepy backwater of Alzheimer disease history...
Prague: N-terminal APP Story Buzzes in the Hallways
A story that broke at Keystone last month strongly pervaded the 9th International AD/PD conference in Prague...
Prague: Tau-Laden Neurons in Zebrafish Glow, Perish on Candid Camera
The protein tau has for years bedeviled dementia researchers...
Prague: Aβ Rehabilitated as an Antimicrobial Protein?
The weird and wonderful world of microbes may hand the field of Alzheimer disease research a physiological function for Aβ...
Prague: Piecing Together Pathology with PyroGlu
Pyroglutamate, or pyroGlu (pGlu) to the initiated, is an aromatic ring form of glutamate that has been discovered in some fragments of amyloid-β...
Spectrum of Neurodegeneration Comes to the Fore
Sometimes in science, a concept lingers unattended in the collective back of researchers’ minds for years...
Et tu, Brute? Parkinson’s GWAS Fingers Tau Next to α-Synuclein
Thomas Gasser of the Hertie Institute in Tuebingen, Germany, presented data that illustrated two emerging concepts in neurodegenerative disease research...
Neither Fish Nor Fowl—Dementia With Lewy Bodies Often Missed
Perhaps the biggest, and quintessential, representative of a spectrum neurodegenerative disease is dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB)...
Like DLB, Like AD—Do Oligomers Stir Up the Trouble?
Current work on distinguishing Alzheimer disease from its cousin dementia with Lewy bodies has underscored one intriguing similarity between the two...
Ordnung, Please—Can Biomarkers Tame a Bewildering Overlap?
Tangible progress in dealing with spectrum diseases will remain limited until the field comes up with more and better biomarkers of their component proteins...
Still Early Days for α-synuclein Fluid Marker
Well over a decade of research into fluid biomarker candidates has reached a point where a so-called “pathological signature” of amyloid-β and tau proteins is beginning to emerge...
Meet Progranulin, The Biomarker—A Simpler Story?
Scientists wrestling the complexities of α-synuclein fluid biochemistry might be forgiven for looking with some envy to a different protein of the neurodegenerative disease spectrum...
Reshuffle Parkinson’s Genetics to Lay Out Its Pathways?
This penultimate article in this Alzforum series reports the call of a founding neurogeneticist to reorganize the genetics of Parkinson’s and related diseases...
More Than Gaucher’s—GBA Throws Its Weight Around Lewy Body Disease
This news story on the glucocerebrosidase (GBA) gene closes the Alzforum series on emerging concepts in the neurodegenerative disease spectrum...