Asking the Big Questions in Dublin’s Fair City – Part 2

Mary Ni Lochlainn is an Academic Clinical Fellow in Geriatric Medicine. She works at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

In the world of Alzheimer’s research we heard from Professor Michael Rowan, who focused on amyloid and ageing. Sleep and mood disorders can pre-date dementia diagnoses, and we see circadian rhythm disturbances in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Is there a window of opportunity here for preventative interventions? Alzheimer’s is a disease of abnormal protein aggregation – both amyloid and tau. Protein clearance tends to happen at night. Can we draw connections here? Prof Rowan explained that a recent New England Journal of Medicine paper showed 30% of patients didn’t have any amyloid even though they had been diagnosed with AD and enrolled in a trial. So what does this mean? Do these patients have another dementia? It cannot be denied that a blood or cerebrospinal fluid test would be very helpful in this diagnostic process.

Asking the Big Questions in Dublin’s Fair City – Part 1

Mary Ni Lochlainn is an Academic Clinical Fellow in Geriatric Medicine. She works at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

This February marked the first, hopefully of many, Biogerontology for Clinicians International Conference, held at the state-of-the-art Mercer Institute of Successful Ageing (MISA) at St. James’ Hospital, Dublin. Hosted by the inimitable Professor Rose Anne Kenny, of Trinity College Dublin, and staff of The Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing (TILDA), the programme boasted twelve expert speakers across a day and a half, with the aim of putting recent advances in biology in context with the pathology of ageing. The idea was to bring together leaders in ageing from various backgrounds, to ‘generate meaningful collaborative, translational approaches with significant potential strategic value to service users.’ And it certainly achieved those aims.