Vanderbilt researchers are using artificial intelligence to search for existing drugs used for other problems that might help patients Alzheimer's Disease.

The Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine has been named an Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium Member Site.

A Vanderbilt study of genetic risks for cognitive impairment later in life uses data from 32,426 research participants ages 60 and older to elaborate these risks across sex and across the intersection of sex and race.

MRI brain scans at baseline for study participants 60 and older — who were free of clinical dementia at study entry — predicted a decline in independent function five years later.

Vanderbilt researchers used novel MRI methods to noninvasively quantify measures of neurofluid circulation and found that hypertrophy of a site of cerebrospinal fluid egress may be related to amyloid-beta retention in Alzheimer’s disease.

A machine learning method based on neural networks outperformed a mutational scanning model at identifying disease-causing mutations in an Alzheimer’s disease protein, suggesting the method could be useful for facilitating therapeutic design.

Vanderbilt researchers found that a protein with roles in innate immunity worsens memory at baseline in carriers of APOE-e4, the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, further implicating neuroinflammation in cognitive decline.