Newborn babies and patients with Alzheimer’s disease share an unexpected biological trait: elevated levels of a well-known biomarker for Alzheimer’s, as shown in a study led by researchers at the University of Gothenburg and published in Brain Communications.

First author Fernando Gonzalez-Ortiz and senior author Professor Kaj Blennow recently reported that both newborns and Alzheimer’s patients have elevated blood levels of a protein called phosphorylated tau, specifically a form called p-tau217.

This protein has largely been used as a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease, where an increase in p-tau217 blood levels is proposed to be driven by another process, namely the aggregation of b-amyloid protein into amyloid plaques. Newborns (for natural reasons) do not have this type of pathological change, so interestingly, in newborns increased plasma p-tau217 seems to reflect a completely different—and entirely healthy—mechanism.

A drug used for Parkinson’s disease has been shown to be effective in reducing the symptoms of difficult to treat depression, according to a study led by the University of Oxford.

In the largest clinical trial to date, pramipexole was found to be substantially more effective than a placebo at reducing the symptoms of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) over the course of nearly a year, when added to ongoing antidepressant medication.

The trial, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, included 150 patients with treatment-resistant depression, with equal numbers receiving 48 weeks of pramipexole or a placebo, alongside ongoing antidepressant medication.

A collaborative project by Mass General Cancer Center researchers to bring the promise of cell therapy to patients with a deadly form of brain cancer has shown dramatic results among the first patients to receive the novel treatment.