After mild stroke, more sleep or time spent trying to sleep tied to thinking problems
Peer-Reviewed Publication
In honor of Alzheimer's Awareness Month, we’re exploring the science and stories surrounding Alzheimer’s disease.
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 27-Jul-2025 22:11 ET (28-Jul-2025 02:11 GMT/UTC)
After a mild stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA), people who spend more time in bed sleeping or trying to sleep may be more likely to have lower scores on tests of thinking and memory skills and changes in their brains that can lead to dementia or second strokes, according to a study published on May 28, 2025, online in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Rural Georgians may find it difficult to access medication that could slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.
By measuring these three features, the researchers found they could monitor the brain’s glymphatic system, which acts as a waste-removal and nutrient-delivery system.
This is the first time that researchers have been able to track the flow of glymphatic fluid in individuals at different levels of sleep through a single night. Previously these processes could only be monitored at university research centers by using MRI, an approach that is too slow to track minute changes in individuals’ sleep stages.
Memory impairment, particularly in the context of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia, has become an increasingly pressing global health concern. With current pharmaceutical treatments offering limited efficacy, interest is growing in traditional herbal medicines. This review explores medicinal plants from the Indian subcontinent traditionally used to treat memory loss, assessing their scientific validation and mechanistic pathways, especially in relation to AD.
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) offers an opportunity for non-invasive detection of eye diseases, cardiovascular disorders, neurodegenerative conditions and even cancers. However, its widespread usage is hindered by its limited image acquisition speed and signal strength. These limitations create an unavoidable compromise between scanning area and image clarity. Most significantly, they block clinicians from obtaining quantitative data, such as blood flow velocity, a crucial early-warning signal of disease progression that often appears before any visible structural abnormalities emerge. Spectrally extended line field OCTA (SELF-OCTA) offers a cost-effective solution to these challenges. This imaging technology achieves a multiplicative increase in image acquisition speed via parallel sampling, while concurrently improving signal strength and enabling safter ocular laser application. SELF-OCTA demonstrates significant advantages over conventional OCTA technologies in both human skin and retina in vivo imaging: (1) achieving significantly enlarged field of view while preserving microvascular details, and (2) enabling blood flow velocity measurement across an unprecedented range (Fig. 1). The technology does not require significant alterations with respect to the OCTA devices commonly used in the clinics, emphasizing that the above-mentioned advanced imaging capabilities can be widely deployed and available for disease screening, early diagnosis and follow-up in large populations. One of such diseases is diabetic retinopathy (DR) which requires constant follow-ups with wide field over long term periods. However, there is few wide-field OCTA device accessible and affordable. SELF-OCTA will potentially make wide-field OCTA accessible and affordable to all DR patients with low-cost. One of the other such diseases is age-related macular degeneration (AMD) which can be diagnosis earlier by quantitatively examining the abnormal changes in blood flow velocity. SELF-OCTA will potentially change the screening and diagnostic paradigm of diseases by detecting the disease at the reversible or treatable stage, instead of advanced stages. SELF-OCTA also opens the avenue for screening systematic diseases noninvasively and conveniently with retinal OCTA at earlier stages, including but not limited to coronary atherosclerosis, strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia.