Vanderbilt researchers took part in an online panel discussion this week sponsored by the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement (WAM), hosted by journalist and author Maria Shriver, the organization’s founder, and NBC news anchor Richard Lui.

A research team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center reports in Neurology that greater stiffening of the aorta, the main artery in the human body, is associated in older adults with increased Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology as reflected in a range of neurochemical indicators measured in cerebrospinal fluid.

Leaders at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have announced that the Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer’s Center (VMAC), currently housed in the Department of Neurology, will become a freestanding institutional center.

With the aid of an $18.2 million, five-year grant renewal from the National Institute on Aging, the Vanderbilt Memory and Aging Project (VMAP) will advance interdisciplinary research into abnormal brain aging and cognitive decline in older adults, with continuing emphasis on the role of blood flow changes in the heart and brain.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) involves distinctive wasting away of certain brain regions, such that medical imaging of these regions can distinguish the disease from other subtypes of dementia.

Enlarged perivascular spaces, which are commonly seen on brain MRIs in older adults, have important associations with worse cognitive performance, particularly information processing speed and executive function, according to a new study that challenges historical consideration that perivascular spaces are a harmless imaging marker.

Detecting the neuropathology underlying cognitive impairment by lead to new targeted therapies.