$3.5 Million Grant Supports Effort Led by Penn Medicine to Diversify Alzheimerâs Disease Research
Penn and community organizations partnering to address Alzheimerâs disease health disparities
Newswise PHILADELPHIA Black adults are more likely than other groups to develop Alzheimer s disease or related disorders but are poorly represented in Alzheimer’s disease research, including recent clinical trials. This health disparity illustrates how Black individuals can benefit from advances in the field if they had access.
This week, the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement (CURE) program announced it will award a $3.5 million grant to Penn Medicine researchers and community partners to address the underrepresentation of Black adults in Alzheimer’s Disease research. The grant supports the Aging Brain Cohort Dedicated to Diversity (ABCD
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PHILADELPHIA Black adults are more likely than other groups to develop Alzheimer s disease or related disorders but are poorly represented in Alzheimer s disease research, including recent clinical trials. This health disparity illustrates how Black individuals can benefit from advances in the field if they had access.
This week, the Pennsylvania Department of Health s Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement (CURE) program announced it will award a $3.5 million grant to Penn Medicine researchers and community partners to address the underrepresentation of Black adults in Alzheimer s Disease research. The grant supports the Aging Brain Cohort Dedicated to Diversity (ABCD2) study, a research and training initiative led by David Wolk, MD, a professor of Neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Wolk is also the incoming director of the Alzheimer s Disease Research Center, and co-director of the Penn Memory Center.
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PHILADELPHIA Art appreciation is considered essential to human experience. While taste in art varies depending on the individual, cognitive neuroscience can provide clues about how viewing art affects our neural systems, and evaluate how these systems inform our valuation of art. For instance, one study shows that viewing art activates motor areas, both in clear representations of movement, like Adam and Eve in Michelangelo s Expulsion from Paradise, and in implied movement through brush strokes, like in Franz Kline s gestural paintings.
Altered neural functioning, like that experienced in patients with Parkinson s disease, changes the way art is both perceived and valued, according to a study published recently in The
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PHILADELPHIA Piperlongumine, a chemical compound found in the Indian Long Pepper plant (Piper longum), is known to kill cancerous cells in many tumor types, including brain tumors. Now an international team including researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has illuminated one way in which the piperlongumine works in animal models and has confirmed its strong activity against glioblastoma, one of the least treatable types of brain cancer.
The researchers, whose findings were published this month in
ACS Central Science, showed in detail how piperlongumine binds to and hinders the activity of a protein called TRPV2, which is overexpressed in glioblastoma in a way that appears to drive cancer progression. The scientists found that piperlongumine treatment radically shrank glioblastoma tumors and extended life in two mouse models of this cancer, and also selectively destroyed glioblastoma cells taken from human patients.
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PHILADELPHIA Researchers at Penn Medicine have identified more genetic mutations that strongly predispose younger, otherwise healthy women to peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM), a rare condition characterized by weakness of the heart muscle that begins sometime during the final month of pregnancy through five months after delivery. PPCM can cause severe heart failure and often leads to lifelong heart failure and even death. The study is published today in
Circulation.
PPCM affects women in one out of every 2,000 deliveries worldwide, with about a third of those women developing heart failure for life, and about five percent of them dying within a few years. Maternal mortality in the United States has doubled in the last 20 years, and PPCM is a leading cause of these deaths. Previously, the reasons behind why women developed PPCM remained a mystery until a 2016 study strongly suggested that some genetic mutations predispose women to the disease.