NeurologyLive® Year in Review 2022: Top Dementia Expert Interviews

In 2022, the NeurologyLive^® team spoke with hundreds of people and posted hundreds of hours of interview clips. The staff spoke with neurologists, investigators, advanced practice providers, physical therapists, advocates, patients, pharmacists, and industry experts—anyone involved in the process of delivering clinical care.

These conversations were had with individuals from all over the world, both virtually and in person. The team attended more than 10 annual meetings of medical societies, each and every time sitting down with experts on-site to learn more about the conversations driving care and the challenges being overcome.

From those in the field of dementia, aging, and Alzheimer disease this year, we learned much about the questions that investigators are asking about brain function and degeneration, the therapeutic approach to these complex diseases, and the goals of clinical care and diagnosis.

Here, we'll highlight the most-viewed expert interviews on NeurologyLive^® this year. Click the buttons to watch more of our conversations with these experts.

1. Changes in Vocation as Early Signs for Alzheimer Disease, Cognitive Issues: Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD

The chief medical officer and cofounder of Linus Health discussed how changes in voice may help serve as early indicators for late-life cognitive deficits. WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

"What’s different here is we can offer quantitative metrics of that, which is immensely powerful. But I don’t think it’s doing anything else than what a really good clinician does, other than put the numbers to it. We then make it scalable and more broadly useful."

2. Outline of New Cleveland Clinic Brain Study: Imad Najm, MD

The director of Cleveland Clinic’s Epilepsy Center provided insight on a new 20-year initiative to uncover more about the origins of neurological diseases and how they occur prior to symptom onset. WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

"What we’re trying to achieve is gain an understanding of what happens during what we call ‘the silent period’ that precedes the clinical onset of neurological problems in patients affected by these various neurological disorders."

3. Addressing Unmet Needs of Dementia With Lewy Bodies: James Galvin, MD, MPH

The director of the Comprehensive Center for Brain Health at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine discussed the treatment differences and unmet needs between dementia with Lewy bodies and Alzheimer disease. WATCH TIME: 4 minutes

“This compounds—CT1812—binds to something called the sigma 2 receptor. What's interesting about binding to this receptor is that it seems to displace or block the ability of these oligomers to bind to cells."

4. Using Prior Success to Improve Alzheimer Trials, Drug Development: Jeffrey Cummings, MD, ScD

The director of the Chambers-Grundy Center for Transformative Neuroscience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas discussed how the momentum gained within the Alzheimer community can springboard success going forward. WATCH TIME: 4 minutes

"If we don’t have to do imaging, don’t have to do lumbar punctures, and can measure the progression of the disease and the effect of the drug through plasma biomarkers, we will be much better positioned in terms of being able to accelerate drug development."

5. Therapeutic Potential of ALZ-801 in High-Risk Alzheimer Disease: Susan Abushakra, MD

The chief medical officer of Alzheon provided perspective on new phase 2 findings assessing the investigational agent ALZ-801 in patients with early Alzheimer disease and a genetic predisposition. WATCH TIME: 5 minutes

"The other exciting thing is that these effects on imaging and cognitive outcomes look very much like our previous data with the old formulation in APOE e4 homozygotes because patients initially showed symptomatic benefit or improvement over their own baseline, and over a year, they remained above baseline. We’ve protected their cognition and that hippocampus for a whole year."

6. The Realities of Gender-Targeted Therapeutics for Alzheimer Disease: Jessica Caldwell, PhD

The chief medical officer and cofounder of Linus Health discussed how changes in voice may help serve as early indicators for late-life cognitive deficits. WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

"That kind of precision medicine, including directing medical targets toward women and men specifically, is certainly the goal. I don't think we're there yet, but I think that work like mine points to the fact that it may be more important to engage women, either in trials or in preventative approaches, even earlier than men.”

7. Details of Item-Level Analysis of Aducanumab at AAN 2022: Sharon Cohen, MD, FRCPC

The neurologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto detailed findings from a new analysis that supports meaningful treatment effect with aducanumab in Alzheimer disease. WATCH TIME: 6 minutes

"What we want to know at the end of the day is: is there one domain or one item or group of items that’s driving the effect? Is the drug better for certain clinical profile than for others? Or, how believable is the response? If memory is responding, but visual spatial function judgement problem solving are not, does it make any sense? The item-level analysis was to shed more light on the individual domains and items in the test."

8. Solving the Biggest Questions About the Brain With Advanced Technology: Michael Sughrue, MD

The founder and chief medical officer of Omniscient Neurotechnology commented on the areas of need with understanding the brain map and treating conditions with multiple pathway crossover. WATCH TIME: 4 minutes

"It’s all great and well for machine learning to spit out 30,000 outputs, but we have to look at these things and say, ‘does this make sense? What does this mean? Why do we think this part of the brain is in the machine learning?’ Humans need to go back and translate it."

9. Scans, Blood Tests in Alzheimer Disease Prevention: Howard Fillit, MD

The founding executive director of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation commented on the potential to detect patients at risk for Alzheimer disease at an earlier age. WATCH TIME: 4 minutes

“We're starting to get towards this precision medicine where we can do what the cancer field calls a ‘liquid biopsy,’and then tailor treatmentsinitially, like cancer,of course, into clinical trials, and eventually into patient care. That day, if we thought about it 5 years ago, would have been a pipe dream.But today, that day of diagnosis and classifying patients according to their pathophysiology is already here, or it is on the horizon—we can see it.”

10. Behavioral Lifestyle Interventions to Improve Cognitive Outcomes for Alzheimer Disease: Jared Roach, MD, PhD

The senior research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology spoke about his presentation on multimodal clinical and lifestyle interventions that improve cognitive outcomes at the 2022 CTAD conference. WATCH TIME: 4 minutes

“Just from the get-go, I have to prove that I can call you up and change your blood, and we've proven that in spades. We're changing the way you'd eat, we're changing the way you're exercise, and as you can imagine, there are many, many molecules that change in your blood.”