Wilbraham & Monson Academy's Yujia "Cynthia" Xie '19 took a trip to Boston during her March break.
Her stay, though, didn't include stops at Bunker Hill or the Museum of Science. Cynthia was at a hospital, specifically Brigham and Women's Hospital, doing research on Alzheimer's disease.
"I'm into biology," admitted Cynthia, who said the opportunity to do extensive laboratory work was too good to pass up.
For 2½ weeks, she worked one on one with a professor from Harvard University who does research for the hospital.
From the start, Cynthia was participating in comprehensive experiments.
"On Day One we learned about brain reactions, when you give stimulus to brain cells and how the computer can record that reaction and what the reaction pattern seems like," Cynthia described. "He explained to me why that is important when investigating the Alzheimer's disease."
From there, Cynthia's work continued to expand, including baseline testing how Amyloid beta interrupts with the memory because it can't form a new pattern.
"With A-beta, there's no change," Cynthia said. "Even though you receive the stimulus, your brain cannot react to the stimulus and it can't be changed. That's why the Alzheimer's patients can't remember things."
The professor also shared his growing research on why red wine prevents the chance of Alzheimer's.
"Red wine has a component, resveratrol, that can block things that trigger A-beta," Cynthia learned. "That's very impressive to me, yet there's little accurate evidence that it can be very effective. The university did broad research comparing red wine takers to the non-red wine takers and it shows the different levels of incidents of these two populations.
"Overall, I think this experience was really intriguing and priceless. After all, Alzheimer's disease wasn't something in my lifetime I was planning to spend time to investigate. But now I hope in the future, when I have enough knowledge and time, I will go back to Brigham and Women's Hospital again to further dig into this topic."