Sun. Oct 13, 2019 8:40 AM - 10:20 AM Room 14 (Palace Room A)

Organizer / Chair: Tetsuaki ARAI (Department of Psychiatry, Division of Clinical Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Japan), Co-chair: Zhou WU (Department of Aging Science and Pharmacology Faculty of Dental Science, Kyushu University, Japan), Discussant: ‌Nobuhisa IWATA (Department of Genome-based Drug Discovery, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Nagasaki University, Japan)

The patients with neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease or dementia with Lewy body are increasing in the developed countries. It is estimated that the number of patients with dementia will be 74,700,000 people in 2030 all over the world. In an Asian region, the patients with newly diagnosed of dementia are largely increasing in comparison with a prediction of 2012, which occupy 49% of whole new patients. The amount of social security for dementia patients continues rising. Currently, there are no effective treatment options for neurodegenerative diseases. To overcome these diseases, new approaches are necessary. It has been suggested that the involvement of neuroinflammation in neurodegenerative diseases, however, the precise mechanism of neuroinflammation remain to be elucidated. Recently, there have been reported that the pathologies of neurodegenerative diseases are spreading such as prion protein in prion disease. This cell to cell transmission of aggregated protein is called “prion-like propagation”. Prion-like propagation is remarkable in new pathological mechanism of neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, we are focusing on neuroinflammation by glial cells and propagation of aggregated protein in these diseases. In this symposium, we aim to introduce the recent findings of this field and would like to discuss about disease-modifying therapy for neurodegenerative diseases.