On a cutting surface inside a Scaife Hall laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, Julia Kofler examines a brain, pointing out its weight, tiny specks of fatty plaque and other features visible even to the naked eye that provide clues to diseases. It is one of about 2,000 human brains to be processed into Pitt’s Neurodegenerative Brain Bank, one of the oldest and most established in the country.
“We have pretty much every diagnosis that you can think of under the realm of neurodegenerative diseases,” said Kofler, director of the division of neuropathology at Pitt. “We have brains from 1-year-olds to 105-year-olds.”
When Pitt’s brain bank was founded in 1985, criteria for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease had only been established the year before. In the 1960s and ’70s, there was debate over even studying degenerative brain diseases, then referred to as “senile dementia,” under the reasoning that they were an inevitable part of aging and research money would be better used elsewhere…