Curated News: National Institute on Aging (NIA)

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A Wayne State University School of Medicine faculty member has been awarded a total of $2.3 million by the National Institute on Aging of the National institutes of Health for two new, concurrent projects that both address questions related to Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive, age-related degenerative brain disease characterized by memory problems, impaired judgment, cognitive issues and changes in personality.

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People in early middle age who have poor sleep quality, including having difficulty falling or staying asleep, have more signs of poor brain health in late middle age, according to a study published in the October 23, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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New research led by Florida State University College of Medicine faculty quantified the association between loneliness and dementia by analyzing data from more than 600,000 people around the world — the largest study of its kind. The meta-analysis of 21 longitudinal studies showed that experiencing feelings of loneliness increased the risk of developing dementia by 31%.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has been awarded two grants by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to train graduate students on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research and commercialization. NIA is one of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary federal agency supporting and conducting AD research.

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Psychiatric drugs are reported to be about 50% more effective in clinical trials funded by the drug’s manufacturer than when trials of the same drug are sponsored by other groups, new research shows.

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A study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) found the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease was 76 percent higher among those with a history of damage to the lining of their upper gastrointestinal (GI) tract than among those without.

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Vaginal estrogen cream, which is commonly prescribed to help women after surgery for pelvic organ prolapse (POP), did not prevent a recurrence of the condition, according to results of a multicenter clinical trial led by UT Southwestern Medical Center. However, the medication did reduce symptoms of vaginal atrophy. The findings, reported in JAMA, could lead to new ways to improve outcomes of prolapse repairs, the study authors said.

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Needs related to housing, transportation, food, social support and more can be identified through AI/ML techniques.

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People with chronic pain who take opioids have trouble finding multimodal pain care; insurance and provider education changes are needed, experts say.

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With a $16 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Irvine will work with community partners to improve the representation of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander adults in research on aging, caregiving, and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

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New research in colorectal cancers directed by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center suggests that expression of transcription factors — proteins that help turn specific genes on or off by binding to nearby DNA — may play a central role in the degree of DNA methylation across the genome, contributing to the development of different subtypes of these cancers. Methylation is a process in which certain chemical groups attach to areas of DNA that guide genes’ on/off switches.

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People who carry the gene variant associated with the strongest risk for Alzheimer’s disease may lose their ability to detect odors earlier than people who do not carry the gene variant, which may be an early sign of future memory and thinking problems, according to a study published in the July 26, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The gene variant associated with this increased risk of Alzheimer’s is called APOE e4.

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More than 1.4 million times a year, people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia end up in emergency care, making up nearly 7% of all emergency visits for any reason by people over age 65, a new study shows. Compared with their peers who don’t have dementia, these patients have twice the rate of seeking emergency care after an accident or a behavioral or mental health crisis.

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A recent study from the lab of the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Director Linda Van Eldik, Ph.D., has been published in PLOS ONE. The work centers around the idea that various anti-inflammatory drugs could be effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This study focused on a protein known as p38.

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The number of young people in the United States visiting hospital emergency departments for mental health crises increased sharply during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study led by researchers from the Department of Health Care Policy in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.

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On July 6, 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted full approval to lecanemab, marketed as Leqembi, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging has been working with this drug and others like it for more than a decade.

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A $40.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will fund the Asian Cohort for Alzheimer’s Disease (ACAD) study at Penn Medicine and 15 other academic research centers across the United States and Canada.

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People with low incomes who live in states that expanded Medicaid got more of the kind of health care that can keep them healthier in the long run, compared with similar people in non-expansion states.

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A soft robotic glove is lending a “hand” and providing hope to piano players who have suffered a disabling stroke. Combining flexible tactile sensors, soft actuators and AI, this robotic glove is the first to “feel” the difference between correct and incorrect versions of the same song and to combine these features into a single hand exoskeleton. Unlike prior exoskeletons, this new technology provides precise force and guidance in recovering the fine finger movements required for piano playing and other complex tasks.

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In a study that followed more than 2,000 community-dwelling older adults over eight years, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have significant new evidence of a link between decreased sense of smell and risk of developing late-life depression.