Research Projects

The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a common cause of early-onset dementia that presents with changes in behavior and personality. It is often misdiagnosed and mistaken for a psychiatric disorder, such as depression or bipolar disorder. Unlike with Alzheimer’s disease, we still lack reliable tests that enable a diagnosis...

DECIDE (Diagnostic Enhancement of Confidence by an International Distributed Environment), aims at creating a e-Infrastructure to enhance the diagnostic confidence in chronic brain diseases such as Alzheimer and dementia. Proper management of these neurodegenerative diseases are thought to be very important in terms of health-economical point of...

Neurodegenerative diseases are triggered by protein aggregation in the CNS, but developing therapies has been challenging. Since key disease mechanisms change during disease progression, halting further neuron loss has not been achieved and may not even improve the symptoms and survival. Causal therapy is most realistic for monogenic disease...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder and is incurable. A drug candidate specifically inhibiting butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) activity will lead to improved clinical outcome in the treatment of AD. The fellow Qiong Shen (QS) has extensive experience, knowledge and technical skills in research into AD. Previously she...

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by the accumulation of proteins and protein fragments in the brain, progressive neuronal loss, inflammation, and the gradual and inevitable decline of memory and cognition. Decline of memory and cognition is coupled with binding of β amyloid peptides (Aβ) and their derived diffusible...

The central aim of the project is to apply multimodal spectroscopy combined with machine learning to identify a fingerprint for Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in saliva and plasma. FTD is the second most common dementia and usually affects individuals younger than 60 years old. FTD is difficult to diagnose, since there...

Normal aging is associated with declines in episodic memory and executive functions. Research suggests that around 20-50% of clinically healthy individuals show significant accumulation of amyloid, one of the hallmark biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease but it has been difficult to establish the functional impact of amyloid burden in healthy older...

Chronic migraine is defined as a headache persistent for more than 3 months or a severe headache persistent for more than 15 days within a month. It affects approximately 2% of the world population. The World Health Organization classifies severe migraine attacks as among the most disabling illnesses, comparable to dementia and quadriplegia...

Neurodegenerative disorders represent the most important medical, social and financial challenges for the 21st century. In 2018, the world counts 50 million people with Alzheimer’s disease and 7 million with Parkinson’s disease, and the number of cases will double before 2050. The current medical paradigms, which incriminate amyloid plaques as the...

Worlwide, about 60 million people have some kind of difficulty in walking, which is related to some neurological disorder (stroke, dementia, neuromuscular diseases, etc). Roughly 40 million of affected correspond to elders and the % is higher in Europe. The remaining is the sum of physically disabled by cerebral palsy (14 million), neuromuscular...

Fibrillar deposits of proteins are the hallmark of amyloid diseases, amongst which Alzheimer’s disease stands out as the most widespread neurodegenerative pathology of the brain. Neuronal dysfunction is currently attributed to the interaction of A-beta oligomers with the plasma membrane. Several scenarios have been proposed, but the mechanisms of...

Human populations are impregnated by various types of chemical pollutants reported as hazardous waste present in the environment. Certain pollutants have adverse effects on brain, but the underlying mechanisms and time-window exposures are still unknown, as well as their contribution on dementia, the 7th leading cause of death. EXPOSIGNALZ project...