Research Projects

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia in the elderly. Accumulating evidence links AD with vascular risk factors. These correlations, together with profound alterations of cerebrovascular structure and function present in AD, suggest a “vascular hypothesis”, where vascular pathology eventually leads to neurodegeneration and...

One of the main socioeconomics challenges to be faced in the next decades will be the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) due to population ageing. Today, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of such illness is complex, a laborious process completed by a limited set of Neurologist experts who need to...

The Doctoral Network “Co-designing a Home with Dementia” (HOMEDEM) is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Actions' Innovative Training Network that will provide high-level training in design and dementia caregiving, to high achieving, early-stage researchers. HOMEDEM focuses on the recent move across Europe towards supporting people with dementia (PwD) living...

People with dementia and their care partners are often dissatisfied with the process of diagnosis, communication and recommendations after diagnosis. We aim to design with people with dementia, their care partners and clinicians recommendations and campaigns for all concerned on how to improve diagnostic process and post-diagnostic care in Europe...

Frailty leads to reduced competence in activities of daily living, independence, as well as secondary health problems and threats, e.g. falls, depression, anxiety and isolation. Frailty in persons with dementia interacts within a “vicious circle”, promoting physical decline. CO-TRAIN will develop a coaching system for functional exercise training...

"Tau is an intrinsically disordered protein that regulates microtubule activity in neurons. Aggregation of tau into amyloid fibrils is diagnostic of several diseases, termed tauopathies, that include Alzheimer's disease. Distinct amyloid aggregate structures, so-called ""strains"", are involved in different tauopathies. These assemblies can spread...

Older adults show difficulties with bilingual language processing and switching compared to younger adults. For example, they need more time to switch between languages and show more cross-language intrusions. Language problems have not only been found for healthy older adults, but also in patients with dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Language...

Cognitive impairment and dementia have dramatic individual and social consequences, and create high economic costs for societies. In order to delay cognitive aging of future generations as long as possible, we need evidence about which contextual factors are most supportive for individuals to reach highest cognitive levels relative to their...

The cDAC ERC Advanced project develops and validates a theory of consciousness and its application to the understanding and alleviation of its deficits. cDAC proposes that consciousness is a virtualization memory system that monitors and optimizes the real-time control of perception, cognition and action realized in a multi-layered architecture...

New perspectives are opening in neuroscience: the era of electricity is transitioning into the era of light. Super-resolution microscopy was elected “Method of the year 2008” and optogenetics “Method of the year 2010” by the Journal Nature Methods. HOLOSTED is a biophysics project using these modern optical methods to study the effects of Alzheimer...

Common mechanisms and pathways in Stroke and Alzheimer's disease. It has long been recognized that stroke and (Alzheimer’s Disease) AD often co-occur and have an overlapping pathogenesis. As such, these two diseases are not considered fellow travelers, but rather partners in crime. This multidisciplinary consortium includes epidemiologists...

The COVID pandemic can be seen as an experiment done with the entirety of humankind (as almost everybody has been or will get infected with SARS-CoV-2). It will therefore have the best coverage over the widest variation possible and is therefore ideally suited to study the effects of infections with SARS-CoV-2 on large quantities of heterogeneous...