New Insights Into Alzheimer's Disease

A study published in Current Biology may offer new insights into Alzheimer's disease, reports ScienceDaily . The investigators demonstrated that how two areas of the brain interact during sleep may explain Alzheimer's symptoms. They explored memory replay — the playback of activity patterns from waking experience during sleep — in a mouse model of Alzheimer's as a potential cause of impaired spatial learning and memory. During these periods, the mice modeling aspects of Alzheimer's in humans had deteriorated functional interactions between the hippocampus and the parietal cortex. The hippocampus is critical for storing "episodic" memories, and considered essential for helping other brain regions extract generalized knowledge from these personal experiences. "A better predictor of performance and the first impairment to emerge was not 'memory replay' per se, but was instead the relative strength of the post-learning coupling between two brain regions known to be important for learning and memory: the hippocampus and the parietal cortex," said Florida State University Professor Aaron Wilber.