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Florin Despa says that a major scientific goal is to understand whether the same factors that are involved in age-related metabolic disorders such as type-2 diabetes may also play a role in the development and progression of cognitive decline and dementia.

A $2.9 million grant from the NIH is supporting a multidisciplinary team of UK researchers in continuing their work to find therapeutic strategies to resolve neurovascular inflammation and repair blood-brain barrier dysfunction in epilepsy.

In the sessions for both the scientific and community audience, attendees will have the opportunity to hear clinicians and researchers from UK and other institutions share current findings, trends, and latest updates on dementia and aging disorders.

Butterfield is among the top 0.007% of scholars worldwide based on authorship of Alzheimer’s-related publications indexed in the PubMed database for the past 10 years. He ranks tenth out of nearly 150,000 scholars worldwide and sixth in the U.S.

Selenica says their study is the first to provide a novel pathway and identify potential therapeutic targets for TDP-43 proteinopathies – especially in Alzheimer’s disease and the newly characterized form of dementia known as LATE.

Through the group's work, they found that the therapeutic targeting of TREM2 using a TREM2-activating antibody leads to the activation of microglia, recruitment of microglia to amyloid plaques, reduced amyloid deposition, and ultimately improved cognition.

“We used to think that aging-related memory and thinking decline meant one thing: a disease called Alzheimer’s disease. Now we know that the disease we were calling Alzheimer’s disease is actually many different conditions, often in combination."

Prendergast says statistics show that less than five percent of undergraduate neuroscience students in the U.S. are Black or African American, but at UK nearly ten percent of undergraduate neuroscience majors identify as Black or African American.

Researchers will be looking at a medication that recently received experimental approval from the USDA and its impact on the newly characterized form of dementia known as LATE. LATE is a disease with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease.

The National Institutes of Health award will fund ongoing research led by UK Neuroscience and Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Center (SCoBIRC) Professor Patrick Sullivan, Ph.D., who has studied the effects of the experimental drug MP201 on TBI.