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Originally published at MedicalXpress by Gladstone Institutes , on November 26, 2024 Aged App NL-G-F mice show robust AD-related pathology and mild impairments in the Morris water maze. Credit: Cell Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114870 Subtle signs of Alzheimer's disease can emerge decades before a diagnosis —often in the form of irregular behaviors that reflect very early stages of brain dysfunction . But until now, identifying and measuring these slight behavioral changes in a scientific way hasn't been feasibl e, not even when studying Alzheimer's in mice. In a study published in Cell Reports , a team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes used a new video-based machine learning tool to pinpoint otherwise-undetectable signs of early disease in mice that were engineered to mimic key aspects of Alzheimer's. Their work sheds light on a new strategy for identifying neurological disease earlier than currently possible and tracking how it develo...

Originally published by Jon Hamilton at npr.org, on November 11, 2024 A study of cells from 84 cadaver brains suggests that Alzheimer's has two distinct phases, and that one type of neuron is especially vulnerable. Scientists have found one type of neuron is affected early in Alzheimer's.koto_feja/Getty Images/E+ "There's an early phase where there's a very slow increase in the amount of pathology," says Ed Lein , a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, " then a more exponential phase where suddenly things get really bad ." The study also found evidence that a small subset of neurons known as somatostatin inhibitory neurons begin to die off during the early phase of Alzheimer's , Lein and a team of nearly 100 other scientists report in the journal Nature Neuroscience . "That was quite a surprise," Lein says, because these neurons have received relatively little attention from Alzh...