WOES, Aβ LOAD in AD MICE

ed a lift for the day also help you stay mentally sharp for the long haul? This prospect, which has simmered on the backburner of neurodegenerative disease research, has bubbled to the fore with the publication of two mouse studies in this month’s Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease [1,2]. Led by Gary Arendash, researchers at the University of South Florida, Tampa, with collabora-tors elsewhere, report that caffeine restores normal cog-nition and decreases brain and blood amyloid-β (Aβ) levels in old, memory-impaired Alzheimer’s disease (AD) mice. The work also sheds light mechanistically on how caffeine suppresses β- and γ-secretases, en-zymes that help churn out the peptides in the patholog-ical plaques peppering AD brains. At the end of the year, the Journal of Alzheimer’