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When a longtime dementia patient died last year, Dr. Norman Relkin received a gift from the elderly man's wife in appreciation for years of care: her husband's brain.
In what was also a nod to New York City's status as one of the leading centers for Alzheimer's research, the grieving widow paid to have her husband autopsied and the invaluable brain packed and shipped in dry ice to the lab at the Memory Disorders Program at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell.
Her donation will enable researchers there to use brain tissue samples to conduct tests that may one day uncover the causes and a possible cure for one of the most confounding diseases of an aging brain.
Researchers at New York-Presbyterian and several other hospitals and academic centers across the city are on the forefront of the battle to conquer Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.
The city, already a leader in neuroscience research, is host to three of the approximately 30 National Institutes of Health-funded Alzheimer's disease centers in the country. These three are located at Columbia University, New York University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Much of the research overlaps, but each institution has carved out a specialty. NYU is known for its research in early diagnosis and intervention. Mount Sinai concentrates on the vascular connection. Columbia is strong on stemcell studies. Each institution has at least four or five large studies under way.
Neuroscientists and doctors at the centers say they often collaborate and share brain bank resources with each...