Research Projects

In this project, D. Salas-Gonzalez proposes to develop brain image processing with alpha-stable distributions with applications to intensity normalization, segmentation and diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome and Alzheimer's disease. The expected results of this interdisciplinary project will definitely have applications and impact in the European...

Establishing efficient prevention strategies for dementia and Alzheimer's disease is a major health priority. Since the cascade of events leading to Alzheimer's disease begins many years before the disease is detected, efficient prevention should be initiated early.

This requires identifying individuals in the general population who are at high...

The cerebral microvascular system is essential to a large variety of physiological processes in the brain, including blood delivery and blood flow regulation as a function of neuronal activity (neuro-vascular coupling). It plays a major role in the associated mechanisms leading to disease (stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, …). In the last decade...

The WHO has identified neurological disorders as a major burden and emerging challenge to global healthcare systems. These range from causes such as stroke and dementia, to injuries and viral infections. The prevalence of strokes and dementia are strongly linked to increasing age, for example stroke risk more than doubles every decade after 55...

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia which seriously interferes with the daily life of millions of people. People suffering from Alzheimer’s disease show the accumulation of two misfolded proteins in the nerve cells of their brains – amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Although many aspects of the Alzheimer’s disease pattern are...

Today, five out of ten diseases worldwide resulting in long-term disability are related to the central nervous system. Due to the immense complexity and inter-individual variability of the human mind and brain there are still no effective and side effect free treatment options for many serious neuropsychiatric disorders, such as major depression...

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are fatal neurodegenerative diseases with overlapping genetics and pathology. The most common known cause is expansion of a GGGGCC repeat in the first intron of the gene C9orf72. I discovered that the repeat region is translated in all three reading frames into aggregating...

An expanded GGGGCC repeat in a non-coding region of the C9orf72 gene is the most common known cause of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The repeat RNA is transcribed and accumulates in neuronal RNA aggregates, implicating RNA toxicity as a key pathogenic mechanism. However, the pathways that lead to...

The calcium sensing receptor (CaSR) is a class C Gprotein-coupled receptor that plays a pivotal role in systemic calcium metabolism by regulating parathyroid hormone secretion and urinary Ca excretion. Abnormal CaSR function is implicated in calciotropic disorders, and in non-calciotropic disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), cardiovascular...

With increased life expectancy, there has been a critical growth in the portion of the population that suffers from age-related cognitive decline and dementia. Attempts are therefore being made to find ways to slow brain-aging processes; successful therapies would have a significant impact on the quality of life of individuals, and decrease...

The objective of CARELINK is to deliver a tracking solution that addresses the issue of wandering in People with Dementia (PwD), allowing carers to monitor PwD. Using current machine-learning technologies we will profile user routes that can then be used to build a repository of route patterns to be compared against live routes, thus allowing for...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a major contributor to disease burden and healthcare costs worldwide. AD is usually diagnosed once symptoms like memory impairment become evident. However, at this point typical AD pathology such as Aβ plaques and cell death is already widespread, suggesting that molecular changes have occurred decades before symptom...