Why do some brains survive long after death when most other soft tissue decays? That’s the question a research team led by Alexandra Morton-Hayward at the University of Oxford set out to answer.

The brain is one of the first organs to liquefy and decompose after death. Yet in recent decades, archaeologists have recovered more than 4,400 well-preserved human brains dating back 12,000 years. In more than 1,300 cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left inside skeletal remains.

This phenomenon occurs most often in waterlogged, low-oxygen graves, but scientists lacked a clear explanation for how such a fragile organ can sometimes outlast everything else.

Intermittingly inhaling a high dose of carbon dioxide seems to remove the proteins amyloid and tau, which are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, from the brain by boosting its glymphatic system

Higher baseline plasma p-tau217 was associated with greater 5- and 10-year risks of cognitive impairment and faster cognitive decline among 2,684 cognitively unimpaired adults. Very high levels corresponded to an estimated 38% risk at five years, but selected cohorts and limited long-term data mean routine screening and individualized prediction remain premature.

Dozens of research teams around the world are working to halt, treat and even prevent Alzheimer’s disease, which silently develops in the brain for more than a decade before symptoms appear. Although recent years have brought important advances, researchers continue to search for therapies that can more effectively alter the course of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Professor Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Brain Sciences Department has developed an innovative strategy for treating Alzheimer’s disease. A recipient of the Israel Prize in Life Sciences, Schwartz pioneered research showing that the body’s most protected organ—the brain—is tightly dependent on the immune system for its lifelong functioning, maintenance and repair.

These findings overturned the long-held dogma that the brain was entirely isolated from immune activity and that any immune activity within the brain was inherently detrimental and should therefore be suppressed.

This cohort study examines the absolute risk of progression to cognitive impairment and rates of cognitive decline per the blood-based biomarker plasma phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217) among cognitively unimpaired older adults.