John Hamilton
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But a prominent topic at this year's meeting is cuts and disruptions at agencies including the National Institutes of Health.
John Morrison of the University of California, Davis, is the society's president.
Morrison says many young scientists no longer see a path to a career in research.
If they choose other fields, he says, it will slow efforts to treat diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and schizophrenia.
Researchers studied nerve cells from 19 people who died after experiencing repeated head injuries, often from playing sports like football.
Four of these people had healthy brains.
Fifteen had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a neurodegenerative disease often found in athletes.
A genetic analysis of the nerve cells found a distinctive pattern of gene mutations in brains with CTE.
The pattern was not present in brains that appeared healthy despite exposure to head trauma.
Researchers say the mutations associated with CTE are similar to those found in brain cells from people with Alzheimer's disease.
Both conditions are marked by an accumulation of a protein called tau.
The study involved 92 healthy people who were 65 and older.
Half spent 30 minutes a day for 10 weeks playing video games like Solitaire and Candy Crush.
The other half did exercises from a demanding cognitive training program called BrainHQ.
Etienne de Villers-Sidani of McGill University says in people who got the training, levels of a key chemical messenger increased in a brain area involved in making decisions.
De Villers-Sidani said the chemical messenger, called acetylcholine, typically declines by about 2.5 percent every 10 years starting in middle age.
So cognitive training, he says, rolled back the clock by about a decade.