Research Projects

Alzheimer's disease is a disease in which specific peptides, so-called beta-amyloids, accumulate in the brain, leading to the destruction of neurons and the resulting clinical functional effects, e.g. memory and orientation problems. Discussions are ongoing as to whether or not Alzheimer's disease may be transmissible between individuals and could...

Dementia is 60 times less common in people aged below 65 years than in older adults. However, when dementia occurs at a relatively young age it imposes a particularly severe burden on patients and families. RHAPSODY attempts to improve the management of young-onset dementia across Europe. The project starts with an analysis how health and social...

Fronto-Temporal-Dementia (FTD) is a devastating progressive early onset dementia with a strong genetic influence. Currently, seven genes have been identified that explain >50% of familial cases, but how these different genes lead to a very similar clinical phenotype is still an unanswered question. Currently, there is no cure for FTD and for the...

We will develop and validate an intervention (SHAPE) in 330 people with mild dementia; combining self-management, health promotion, and e-learning. The study is a multi-site, randomised, controlled, single-blinded trial with parallel groups. The intervention group is compared with treatment as usual (TAU). The primary outcome is to evaluate the...

The role of social health in onset, disease course and prognosis of dementia remains underexplored. Social health has been conceptualized as the influence of social resources in finding a balance between capacities and limitations. Moreover, social health affects and is affected by biological processes that underlie the dementia syndrome. This...

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) in elderly individuals with still normal cognitive performance is considered an at-risk condition of Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia and may reflect its first symptomatic manifestation. This makes SCD a promising target for dementia prevention trials. This project aims at creating a transnational, harmonized...

Understanding how fast events at synapses are converted into long-lasting changes of neuronal acti- vity is a very important question in neuroscience. Several recent studies demonstrated that synapses and nuclei are connected by bidirectional communication routes that enable the efficient transfer of information and regulate the long-term...

Alzheimer´s (AD) and Huntington´s disease (HD) result from the erroneous communication of neurons at synapses in different brain areas (neocortex, hippocampus, striatum). The protein BDNF regulates synaptic communication under healthy conditions. However, insufficient release of BDNF from neurons and defective BDNF signaling in target neurons...

We aim to elucidate the exact role of epigenetic dysregulation in the brainstem in the pathogenesis of AD. For this purpose, we will examine post-mortem brainstem tissue derived from AD patients, and matched controls, for epigenetic differences. By investigating AD-specific epigenetic profiles in the blood of individuals suffering from Mild...

Similar to prion diseases, more common fatal neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are linked to the aggregation of different proteins (including Tau, Abeta and alpha- synuclein in the brain of affected patients. Furthermore most of the resulting brain lesions initially appear in specific brain areas and the...

Epidemiological studies have shown that leisure-time physical activity at midlife is associated with a decreased risk of dementia later in life. Although initial studies indicate enhanced behavioural performance in dementia patients after three months of exercise, little is known about the effect of an extensive, controlled and regular exercise...

Several studies have shown that ischemic stroke, a result of an occluded vessel in the brain, could be followed by cognitive decline and, after several strokes, lead to dementia, similar to Alzheimer’s disease but with a different clinical presentation, especially in the beginning. We believe that there is cross-talk between vessel occlusion and...