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Pre-existing cognitive impairment or dementia in patients undergoing surgery are widely recognized as risk factors for postoperative delirium, increasing its likelihood and severity. However, little previous research has focused on whether delirium itself portends or even accelerates a decline into dementia in patients who showed no previous signs of cognitive impairment. Research published today in the  British Journal of Anaesthesia focuses on patients over the age of 65 who were assessed as cognitively normal prior to surgery. This study, led by Professor Juraj Sprung of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, finds those who developed postoperative delirium were three times more likely to suffer permanent cognitive impairment or dementia. Over a ten year period, patients over the age of 65 enrolled at the Mayo Clinic Study of Ageing in Olmsted County Minnesota who were exposed to general anesthesia were included in an investigation involving over two 2000 patients. Their cognitiv...

Pozzo-Miller has now found that the brain penetrant drug -- a small-molecule mimetic of BDNF, or brain derived neurotrophic factor -- is able to improve brain performance in Rett syndrome mice -- specifically synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus and object location memory. The hippocampus is involved in learning and memory. This finding, in collaboration with Frank Longo, M.D., of Stanford University, who had shown the drug's improvement of breathing deficits in Rett mice in collaboration with David Katz, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University, adds to the growing realization that neurodevelopmental disorders that affect early brain development may be amenable to treatment, even after the onset of symptoms, says Pozzo-Miller, a professor of neurobiology in the UAB School of Medicine. "Neurodevelopmental disorders with intellectual disability and autism may not need to last a lifetime," Pozzo-Miller said. This offers hope to many patients and their families and...

To blame are the many undefined subtypes of mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. "Everyone thinks Alzheimer's is one disease, but it's not," said P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., professor of psychiatry and director of the neurocognitive disorders program at Duke Health. "There are many subgroups. If you enroll all different types of people in a trial, but your drug is targeting only one biological pathway, of course the people who don't have that abnormality are not going to respond to the drug, and the trial is going to fail." But if scientists grouped people with similar types of cognitive impairment, they could more precisely test the impact of investigational drugs, according to findings in a July 28 article in the journal  Scientific Reports , a publication of Nature Research. The research was jointly led by Dragan Gamberger, Ph.D., an artificial intelligence expert at the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia and Do...