UC Davis gets $2M to study diabetes-Alzheimer's link

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

UC Davis gets $2M to study diabetes-Alzheimer's linkSacramento Business Journal
University of California Davis professor Charles DeCarli was recently awarded a $2 million grant from the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation to study how diabetes might contribute to memory loss and possibly Alzheimer's disease.

DeCarli and his colleagues at the UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Center will do a four-year study focusing on the brains of diabetics and whether the disease changes the brain and how it processes information. The other researchers on the team are Andrew Yonelinas and John Olichney from the UC Davis Center for the Mind and Brain and Charan Ranganath from the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience.

Using new brain-imaging technology, the team will study the brain's of 200 people with diabetes who do not have dementia and 50 age-matched healthy people.

"We know that diabetes increases the risk for late-life dementia, but no one knows why," DeCarli said in a new release. "We are going to be the first to comprehensively analyze the workings of the memory systems in the brains of diabetics. We think that either something about diabetes is damaging the hippocampus, the memory organ of the brain, or that the disease is causing small strokes that damage the brain over time."



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