Adults with Down syndrome (DS) are predisposed to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and a characterization of glucose metabolism change throughout AD progression has yet to be performed in this population. Using FDG PET, regional glucose metabolism was evaluated across groups of cognitively stable DS (CS-DS), DS with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease (MCI-DS/AD), and healthy non-DS sibling controls.
Slide of the Week
Qiang Chang, PhD – Slide of the Week
Rett syndrome (RTT) is a severe X chromosome-linked debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder caused by mutations in the MECP2 gene affects 1 in 10,000-15,000 girls with no effective treatment. Our lab has been using RTT induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and neurons and astrocytes differentiated from iPSC as a platform to understand RTT disease mechanisms and develop treatment.
Sriram Boothalingam, PhD – Slide of the Week
This study describes a time series-based method of middle ear muscle reflex (MEMR) detection using bilateral clicks, with implications for otoacoustic emission (OAE)-based medial olivocochlear reflex (MOCR) assays. Although current click-based methods can detect changes in the OAE evoking stimulus to monitor the MEMR, these methods do not discriminate between true MEMR-mediated vs. artifactual changes in the stimulus.
Lauren Bishop, PhD – Slide of the Week
Although epilepsy commonly presents with autism in children, it is currently unknown whether established estimates represent the prevalence and incidence of epilepsy in autistic adults. Our objective was to use population-level Medicaid data to determine prevalence, incidence, and antiepileptic drug use associated with epilepsy in a unique population of autistic adults aged 21+ with (N=2,738) and without (N=4,775) intellectual disability and to compare results to adults with intellectual disability alone (N=18,429).
Barbara Bendlin, PhD – Slide of the Week
In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), neurodegenerative processes are ongoing for years prior to the time that cortical atrophy can be reliably detected using conventional neuroimaging techniques. Recent advances in diffusion-weighted imaging have provided new techniques to study neural microstructure, which may provide additional information regarding neurodegeneration.
Karla Ausderau, PhD – Slide of the Week
Examine healthcare usage, pharmacy prescriptions and healthcare cost among people with Intellectual Disability in Wisconsin who participate in Special Olympics compared to people with Intellectual Disability who do not participate in Special Olympics. In addition, a sub-analysis was completed to compare Special Olympics athletes who participated in the Healthy Athlete program to those who had not.
UCEDD – Slide of the Week
Title: Pre- to post-training change in childcare provider belief that developmental monitoring is important and ability to identify appropriate referrals to make when there is a developmental concern Legend: Training in developmental monitoring significantly increases …
Andrew Alexander, PhD – Slide of the Week
Demonstration of the ability of MPnRAGE to correct for severe motion artifacts in a 7 year old girl. Retrospective motion correction greatly reduced motion-induced blurring in both structural T1-weighted images and quantitative T1 maps. The correction greatly improves the reliability of brain imaging measurements in children. The plots indicate the estimated amount of head motions that were corrected.
Donna Werling, PhD – Slide of the Week
Gene expression levels vary across developmental stage, cell type, and region in the brain. Genomic variants also contribute to the variation in expression, and some neuropsychiatric disorder loci may exert their effects through this mechanism. To investigate these relationships, we present BrainVar, a unique resource of paired whole-genome and bulk tissue RNA sequencing from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of 176 individuals across prenatal and post- natal development.
Xinyu Zhao, PhD – Slide of the Week
Title: Identification of FMR1-regulated molecular networks in human neurodevelopment Legend: Generation of FMR1-FLAG hPSCs using one-step seamless genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9, Neural differentiation of hPSCs into forebrain dorsal NPCs (dNPC) and ventral MGE-like NPCs (vNPC), …