A report from Florida estimates that the state recovered $1.7 million for seniors last year in refunds, savings, and money stolen from them, according to News4JAX . The new "Seniors vs. Crime" report shows complaints reported to the state were down last year, from 1,944 in 2019 to 1,783 in 2020. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said criminals continued to exploit seniors even during the pandemic, but volunteers recruited to counter such scammers were undaunted. "Not only did they help protect their fellow seniors who had been victimized, but they also provided thousands of Floridians with the tools needed to avoid scams — all at no cost to seniors," he noted. "While this latest report is promising, our work protecting Florida's seniors is far from over." The Seniors vs. Crime Project was started in 1989 to help prevent crime and fraud, aid consumers in resolving disputes, and help the Florida Attorney General's Office with its mission through the work of Florida senior volunteers. Since Moody's appointment, Seniors vs. Crime has helped recover, refund, and save more than $3.4 million for older Floridians.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than half of all U.S. adults have now received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, amounting to over 129 million people, according to CNBC . Over 83 million adults, or 32.5 percent of the total adult population, are fully vaccinated with one of the three vaccines approved in the United States. The average rate of daily new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is about 68,000, with CDC data indicating an average 3.3 million daily vaccine doses administered in the past week. White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients has said the suspension in Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccinations, which occurred after reports of six cases of rare brain blood clots, would not decelerate the vaccine campaign since the country has sufficient supply of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci said he thinks the U.S. will likely resume use of the J&J shots with a warning or restriction attached, and anticipates a decision as soon as Friday. "I doubt very seriously if they just cancel it. I don't think that's going to happen," he said.

A study published in Brain indicates that loss of the ability to experience pleasure is unique to early-onset dementia, or frontotemporal dementia (FTD), but not Alzheimer's disease, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News . Scientists said this is the first study to associate FTD with anhedonia. Neuroimaging showed gray matter deterioration in the pleasure centers of the brain that differ from brain regions linked to depression or apathy. The authors found marked degeneration in the reward-seeing centers of the brain, including the frontal and striatal areas, in FTD patients. Such individuals exhibited a dramatic decline from pre-disease onset, compared to patients with Alzheimer's disease, who did not show clinically significant anhedonia. Patients with early-onset dementia are frequently misdiagnosed with depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders, potentially because anhedonia also occurs often in people with depression, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The distinctiveness of brain regions associated with early-onset dementia revealed by this study may lead to targeting these regions to develop specific treatments. "Our findings point to the importance of considering anhedonia as a primary presenting feature of behavioral variant FTD and semantic dementia, with distinct neural drivers to that of apathy or depression," the researchers concluded.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo published a study in Brain showing a single molecule's promise of disrupting Alzheimer's disease by breaking down plaque, reports the Courthouse News Service . The method relies on the cause and effect mechanism between light and oxygen, using a light-sensitive molecule called a photo-oxygenation catalyst. The team injected the catalyst into live mice with Alzheimer's disease, and activated it with near-infrared light. By exposing mice brains to this molecule for 30 minutes each day for a week, the scientists observed significant reductions in amyloid proteins, and successfully disrupted the amyloid structures by changing the chemical bonds that gives them cohesion. After destabilizing the plaque, the body's immune system purged the damaged cells. The brain's immune system enveloped the oxygenated amyloids and disintegrated them in acidic compartments. The researchers also applied the catalyst to human brain samples donated by Alzheimer's disease patients. The therapy could theoretically be used to remove amyloid proteins throughout the body no matter when the proteins formed.

A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified a new potential mechanism for age-related macular degeneration, reports EurekAlert . Using laboratory-bred roundworms, the team found a version of complement factor H protein contained in the sensory neurons that help the worms detect chemicals, food, touch, and temperature. The protein manifested in the middle region of the sensory neuron's cilia, adjacent to another known important antenna protein called inversin. But in worms designed to lack complement factor H, the inversin spread throughout the antennas instead of keeping to the middle. The team then used light-detecting cells in tissue from human retinas to confirm these results, finding that in subjects genetically predisposed to macular degeneration, inversin also spread around the antennas. "Our findings suggest that complement factor H plays a role in maintaining the organization of photoreceptor cilia and this process may be defective in age-related macular degeneration," said University of Maryland School of Medicine Professor Bruce Vogel.

Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that a grassroots effort seeks to prioritize immunization against COVID-19 of seniors in Oregon's Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations. The Woven with Elders vaccination toolkit was launched in March by a group of statewide Pacific Islander community organizations through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente. "Our seniors carry our wisdom of our cultural lifeways, pathways, languages, traditions, customs, and practices," said Manumalo Ala'ilima, co-chair of the United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance's Portland chapter. "We wanted to shift the mentality and narrative of seniors being expendable. Many politicians last year were willing to sacrifice them instead of honoring them." The toolkit offers language accessibility, with an English version already published and versions in many Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander dialects forthcoming. Ala'ilima said so far the effort has led to the vaccination of nearly 1,000 community seniors in Multnomah, Marion, and Washington counties. "My hope is that my community is taking this opportunity to become vaccinated because it is the right thing to do for themselves and their households," he said.

CNBC reports that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said people will "likely" need a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated. He also raised the possibility that people will need to get vaccinated against the coronavirus yearly, "but all of that needs to be confirmed. And again, the variants will play a key role." Earlier this month Pfizer said its COVID vaccine was more than 91 percent effective at protecting against the coronavirus and more than 95 percent effective against severe disease up to six months after the second shot. That data was based on more than 12,000 vaccinated participants, but researchers say more data is required to determine whether protection persists after six months. David Kessler, the Biden administration's COVID response chief science officer, said earlier that Americans should expect to receive boosters to protect against coronavirus variants, which could "challenge" the effectiveness of the doses. Pfizer and BioNTech said in February they were testing a third dose of their COVID-19 vaccine to better understand the immune response against new variants.

A new U.K. study suggests the risks of dangerous, rare blood clots in the brain are far higher in those infected by COVID-19 than in those who get either the AstraZeneca vaccine or the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, reports CBS News . Moreover, the number of people who develop clots after getting the vaccines made by the United States appears very similar to the number who get the condition after a shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine. About four in every 1 million people who get the American-made vaccines experience cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT), versus about five in every 1 million who receive the AstraZeneca vaccine. That equates to a 10-fold higher risk of CVT for people who catch the coronavirus than for those who get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and an eightfold greater risk for those receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine. However, Pfizer stated that its own "comprehensive assessment of ongoing aggregate safety data . . . provided no evidence to conclude that arterial or venous thromboembolic events, with or without thrombocytopenia, are a risk associated with the use of our COVID-19 vaccine." Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the study's conclusions comparing the different types of vaccines are "confusing," and the manner of the analysis's execution made such comparisons realistically impossible.

A study in Nature Communications from scientists at the University of York may be relevant to memory disorders, including dementia, where problems recalling relevant information can affect daily life, reports Technology Networks . The brain's long-term memories are categorized as either factual memory or memory of personal experiences, which together help people understand and respond to the surrounding world. The study suggests a shared brain mechanism is critical to controlling the successful retrieval of weak memories, and activity in a set of common brain regions increases when participants retrieve fact and personal memories. "In order to generate appropriate thoughts and behaviors, we have to draw on our memory stores in a highly flexible way," said University of York Professor Elizabeth Jefferies. "This new study highlights control processes within the brain that allow us to focus on unusual aspects of the meanings of words and to retrieve weakly encoded personal experiences. This control over memory allows us to be creative and to adapt as our goals or circumstances change."

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) has proposed a new bill to help families across the United States dealing with Alzheimer's disease, reports TV6 . She said the Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer's Act would help the 95 percent of people with dementia who also have one or more other chronic ailments. The bipartisan legislation is expected to cut medical complications by establishing a new funding channel for dementia care via Medicare. The new model can help lower hospitalizations and emergency department visits and possibly delay placement in nursing communities. Among the bill's provisions is comprehensive care management services, including monitoring additional health conditions, medication management, and care coordination; high care standards established by assessing the quality of care provided to patients; elimination of cost-sharing for patients and monthly sums for providers based on the complexity and quality of the patient's care; guarantees that caregivers are supported and can participate in the coordination and management of care; and mandatory outreach to underrepresented populations.