Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
About once every year and a half, Erin Harvey takes time off of her job as a teacher’s aide and along with her mom, Nancy, makes a two and a half hour drive from her home in central Illinois to the University of Wisconsin–Madison Waisman Center to “embark on an afternoon of adventure.” At the …
To test the hypothesis that cognitively unimpaired individuals with Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathology differ from individuals with AD dementia on biomarkers of neurodegeneration, synaptic dysfunction, and glial activation.
The aberrant accumulation of toxic protein aggregates is a key feature of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. As such, improving normal proteostatic mechanisms is an active target for biomedical research.
Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by accumulation of beta amyloid (Aβ) and hyperphosphorylated tau proteins, which neuropathology suggests follow distinct spatiotemporal patterns.
Myelin and myelin-producing oligodendrocytes appear to be affected in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but this is understudied in humans, particularly in the early stages of disease development.
Waisman Center investigator Luigi Puglielli had trouble with only one class in medical school: biochemistry. Yet today he uses biochemical approaches to study some of the vital molecular mechanisms that regulate brain physiology and pathology across the lifespan. Puglielli, who is a professor in the Department of Medicine, focuses on trying to understand how proteins …
Dan Campbell passed away recently. He was a prolific artist and contributed many pieces of his work to the Waisman Center’s Harvey A. Stevens Collection of Art by People with Disabilities. Dan and his family also participated in a number of research studies at the Waisman Center over the course of more than 30 years, …
January 19, 2016 Channel 3000 University of Wisconsin researchers say they’ve found a treatment to clean up the plaques that form in the brain of mice with Alzheimer’s disease. The research published in the journal Brain shows that compounds that inhibit two cellular proteins can help clean up the plaques found in the brain of …
Brad Christian, PhD, Waisman investigator and associate professor of medical physics and psychiatry, is part of a new National Institutes of Health initiative to identify biomarkers and track the progression of Alzheimer’s in people with Down syndrome.
Legend: Left panel: General patterns of [11C]PiB binding in participants with Down syndrome (DS). PiB binds to amyloid-β plaques, a neuropathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The top row shows nonspecific white matter binding. The middle row shows elevated PiB binding only in the striatum (pointed out by the arrows), which is unique to the …
