Members of Dr. Margaret Flanagan’s lab, which continues work on the Nun Study at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases, presented at the 2025 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) held July 27-31 in Toronto, Canada.
Dr. Flanagan presented a new project that she co-leads called the Brain Digital Slide Archive (BDSA), which helps scientists share and study brain images more easily. This project will help researchers around the world work together to better understand Alzheimer’s disease, promoting open access to data while maintaining confidentiality to adhere to HIPAA requirements.
Researcher Kyra Clarke presented two posters, including one about the Nun Study that expands on Kyra’s recent publication examining how memory and thinking change as people get older. The second poster looks at tiny strokes in the brain, called microinfarcts, and examines how they affect brain cells using differential gene expression data and sophisticated analytical approaches. This project helps scientists understand how problems with blood flow can lead to memory loss.
The School Sisters of Notre Dame are proud to be part of the Nun Study, which continues to shed light on the Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia thirty-five years after 678 SSND volunteered to participate as subjects in the study.
To learn more about the Nun Study, visit https://ssnd.org/ministries/nun_study/.