Defence against dementia

What if the secret to understanding Alzheimer's disease wasn't hidden deep in neurons, but in the tiny blood vessels that feed your brain? Inside the brain's microscopic plumbing system, these tiny pipes form a critical barrier, simply known as the blood-brain barrier, and understanding how and why it breaks down, may be the key to understanding memory loss, confusion, and dementia. Conor McQuaid will explore how inflammation on blood vessel walls can disrupt blood flow, breach the barrier, and quietly set the stage for disease. He'll share the cutting-edge tools being used to crack this problem, and what it might mean for treatments of the future.

Irina is trainee oncologist and CRUK TRACC clinical lecturer, working towards a PhD at the UK Dementia Research Institute in Edinburgh. She studies the lasting brain inflammation that can occur after events like radiation or stroke, causing cognitive decline and affecting patients' quality of life even years later. Her research focuses on the unusual behaviour of microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, which can act harmfully after such events. She aims to understand how these cells use the ATM kinase protein to repair DNA and control cell division, impacting their long-term function.