Some of the top minds in dementia and Alzheimer's research gathered in Lexington recently for the 15th annual Marx Berry Symposium on Aging and Dementia.

We caught up with some of the speakers to find out more about their work and the findings they shared with other researchers.

More on that in our next chapter series that explores the rewards and challenges of growing older.

This is a symposium to honor doctor Will William Mark Berry, who was the founder of the Sanford Brown Center on Aging.

And it's a scientific symposium to discuss Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Sanders Brown Center really is this position center who enables us to get information and give information to the surrounding world.

So the world of experts out there, they give us so much, they give us expertise, they give a diagnostic test that gives us therapies, and we can give that to the community.

A lot of the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease are known.

There is a genetic component of runs in families.

There's specific genes that we know of that can be predictive.

History of concussion and head injury may be contributory.

Basically, anything that's bad for the brain enhances risk of cognitive decline of aging.

That may be due to Alzheimer's pathology, or it may be due to other age related risk factors and disorders.

What was previously thought of is that it was one disease caused all that dementia.

But it turns out that it's actually much more complicated than that.

There's differences between individuals, and there's differences even in individual, for how many different pathologies can be going on.

So we've learned a lot since Alois Alzheimer described it over 100 years ago.

With all he saw were the plaques and tangles.

We see more proteins now.

We see more vascular disease.

So we know a lot more about what's happening in the brains of older people.

And there are different trajectories of either stability or decline.

So there's a lot of work going on in prevention right now.

What there's two tracks here.

One is lifestyle modifications.

So that's a healthy diet like the mind diet or other diets that have been optimized for healthy aging.

Another is exercise which is incredibly beneficial for just about everything.

Healthy sleep hygiene and also social and cognitive stimulation.

Right now, we don't have therapies that are approved for pre-clinical stages of disease before people have symptoms, but that may be coming in the future.

There's a lot of work going on in the field in multiple different realms.

So in prevention and therapy, in mechanism, in the biology underlying this impairment.

And there's still research being done in how to care for people.

What's great about today really covered the full spectrum of what can we do to prevent, what can we do to diagnose, what can we do to treat?

The Mark Symposium on Aging and Dementia was a two day event.

Saturday was the community event where speakers shared current findings, trends, and the latest updates on dementia and healthy brain aging with the public.