August was a hot, humid write-off, but September has been going a lot better for me. After 8 months of struggling with a technique, I finally generated my first dataset, and so far, it looks awesome! I talked to a post-doc working on a similar project yesterday and it looks like my results fit the narrative she's been working on. And they have brain slices available for follow-up validation and have some knock-out mice to see if what we're seeing effects to disease progression. Hopefully this will lead to insight into a new Alzheimer's-associated pathway! I'm also taking a neurotechnology class this semester and it feels rough, but manageable so far. My coloring book from the summer hasn't been for naught, and I'm starting to feel more comfortable hearing people discuss efferent, afferent, plasticity, and cortical layers without switching to immediately definition-lookup time. My optics knowledge is trailing pretty far behind though, and the class yesterday on 2-photon microscopy was mostly: "I understand this neurobiology, but have no idea what went into making these images." Thursdays are mini-rotations in all the labs that work on the methods discussed in the class, so hopefully I'll have a few photos to show you all in future weeks.
It's in my family, too. Sadly, no therapies exist that are able to even slow the disease, let alone halt or reverse it. And a lot of the recent imaging evidence is pointing to the changes building up a decade before any sort of cognitive changes. Even at a research level, it's a field with only a basic grasp of the disease and even more immature tools for studying it. Hopefully that'll change in the next decade... on the plus side, it's basically the core of neurodegenerative research. My feed pulls up 200-300 papers published per week on Alzheimer's, and it looks like people are starting to catch on to the more successful techniques that have come out of the cancer funding bonanza.
There are many topics that I have yet to dive into, environmental risk factors would be one of them. Another up there is its weird association with diabetes. I'll poke you if I get around to reading on the topic in the future. Right now I'm mostly looking at genetic associations and biochemical pathways.