Targeted complement inhibition was able to reduce inflammation and prevent the immune system from finishing off stressed neurons after stroke. The complement system is a part of the innate immune system, and one of its roles is to mark neuronal debris for cleanup in the brain.
The April announcement of a biomarker-based diagnosis for Alzheimer's disease by the National Institute of Aging (NIA) and the Alzheimer's Association (AA) came with assurances that their recommendations were meant as a "research framework to investigate the Alzheimer's disease continuum, not as diagnostic criteria and explicitly not intended for clinical use."
A team from the British University of Cambridge has identified a molecular link between cholesterol and amyloid beta aggregation that could explain why cholesterol processing pathways are implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk by genomewide association studies (GWAS).
AUSTIN, Texas – In Jeffrey Rathmell's reckoning, the modern era of immunometabolism began 25 years ago, with the demonstration that in obese individuals, fat cells will make inflammatory cytokines – an ability that was previously thought to be limited to bona fide immune cells.
Genomewide association studies (GWAS) have so far underperformed in identifying genetic contribution to disease, but they have demonstrated that most genetic contributors to complex diseases consist of small contributions of relatively common variants, rather than large contributions of rare ones. Scientists at the Finnish University of Helsinki have developed a method to calculate a polygenic risk score for such common variants and used it to identify genetic contributions to migraine risk.
Preterm birth is the root cause of roughly a third of deaths in the first year of life in the developed world. Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco have shown fetal immune reactions to maternal proteins during pregnancy. Previous work has shown that maternal immune responses to the fetus contributed to pregnancy complications, but the reverse possibility has received less attention.
LOS ANGELES – At the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting this week, Walter Koroshetz pointed out two causes of the opioid epidemic that are obvious in one sense. But ending the opioid epidemic will require figuring out a way to address the relationship between them.
SAN DIEGO – Collectively, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a treasure trove of drug targets. Somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of FDA-approved therapeutics are thought to work by targeting GPCRs.
