Publications by authors named "S Leurgans"
Article Synopsis
- The study examines how diet patterns relate to the risk of intracranial atherosclerosis (ICAD) in people with existing hypertension or a history of myocardial infarction.
- A total of 676 older adults were autopsied, and none showed a direct link between overall diet and atherosclerosis, though hypertension was found to increase the risk of ICAD.
- Notably, individuals with a healthier diet (like the MIND or Mediterranean diet) had lower chances of severe ICAD, especially among those with a history of myocardial infarction.
Article Synopsis
- The aging brain's cognitive abilities are influenced by a balance between protective lifestyles and the accumulation of brain pathologies, especially in Alzheimer's disease.
- A study involving 440 participants used advanced methods to analyze the relationships between physical activity, cognitive function, and specific brain changes after death.
- Key findings revealed that synaptic peptides are critical for understanding cognitive decline, with lower physical activity linked to greater negative impacts between tau pathology and synaptic health in older adults.
Enlarged perivascular spaces (EPVS) are common in older adults, but their neuropathologic correlates are unclear mainly because most work to date has relied on visual rating scales and/or clinical cohorts. The present study first developed a deep-learning model for automatic segmentation, localization and quantification of EPVS in brain MRI, and then used this model to investigate the neuropathologic, clinical and cognitive correlates of EPVS in 817 community-based older adults that underwent autopsy. The new method exhibited high sensitivity in detecting EPVS as small as 3 mm, good segmentation accuracy and consistency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrey matter ageing-related tau astrogliopathy (ARTAG) pathology is common in aged brains and detected in multiple brain regions. However, the associations of grey matter ARTAG with Alzheimer's disease and other common age-related proteinopathies, in addition to clinical phenotypes, including Alzheimer's dementia and cognitive decline, remain unclear. We examined 442 decedents (mean age at death = 90 years, males = 32%) from three longitudinal community-based clinical-pathological studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Older Black adults are at risk of cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD), which contributes to dementia risk. Two subtypes of CSVD, arteriolosclerosis and ischemic lacunar infarcts, have been independently linked to lower cognition and higher dementia risk, but their combined effects on cognition in older Black adults are unclear.
Methods: Mixed models were used to examine the associations of in vivo measures of arteriolosclerosis (ARTS) and ischemic lacunar infarcts to cognitive level and change in 370 older Black adults without dementia.