What will we discover?
Welcome! In this video Craig introduces some key themes for the course and lets us know what topics we’ll be covering each week. Week 1 – Brain biology Week 2 …
Course: Understanding Brain Health: Preventing Dementia
Brain Health Services
In this video, Craig describes how now is the appropriate time to translate these findings from a research setting into universally available clinical services. Services that put a priority focus …
Capturing cognition
We’ve discussed already how the use of biomarkers, for example using neuroimaging and analysis of cerebrospinal fluid, can help us pick up on disease processes before obvious cognitive symptoms may …
Investigating biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease
Here we investigate the biomarkers currently used to aid in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Craig takes us through some key features to look out for on a brain scan …
Going in early: Researching prevention
Craig introduces us to some large research programmes which follow people over time in a great level of detail to help improve our understanding of the earliest brain changes related …
Weighing up Risk of Neurodegenerative Diseases
Assessing risk for disease is often a complicated balance of weighing up an individual’s genetics and other health-related exposures that accumulate throughout life. Different risk factors can also commonly be …
Prioritising brain health throughout life
At the very start of this course we set ourselves one question to keep in mind throughout our various activities and discussions. We’ve thought a lot here about the biology …
Glossary
A handy list of definitions for key terms used throughout this course A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R …
The Global Burden of Neurodegenerative Disease
Today, 50 million people worldwide are living with dementia. This figure is projected to almost triple to over 130 million people by the year 2050. Age, above all else, remains …
The big question
On our journey through this course we’ll consider many areas of research, clinical practice and day to day life. All of these topics have important implications for how we detect, …
Preparing for Disease Modifying Therapies
We’ve discussed already the huge amount of energy and resource being invested in the search for disease modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. When these therapies do become available over the …
How Do Clinical Trials Work?
To test potential new treatments we need clinical trials – often called ‘drug trials’. These are controlled tests, strictly carried out to try as much as possible to ensure any …
Case Study on Diagnosing Dementia
Before we start to discuss building brain-health focussed clinical services, let’s remind ourselves of the current context by taking a quick look at a typical example of steps to receiving …
How Do We Investigate the Health of the Brain?
We can’t remove a sample of living brain tissue to view under a microscope. So how can we determine the health of this all-important organ hidden inside our skull? Over …
What are biomarkers?
Biomarkers are measurable signals that help provide a read on the state of health or disease in the body. If we know a particular biomarker reflects a particular condition then …