Frances Farmer. Alzheimer's Disease Center: Dementia Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatments. Heimer's Association - What is Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's and dementia basics Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia, a general term for memory loss and other intellectual abilities serious enough to interfere with daily life.
Alzheimer's disease accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. Learn more: What We Know Today and Understanding Dementia. Get our weekly e-newsletter There is a lot to know about living with Alzheimer's disease. Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception. I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute.
This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. So I sat rapt during the neuroscientists’ talks as they described how our minds perceive the past, present, and future. McDermott outlined the case of Patient K.C., who has even worse amnesia than the better-known H.M. on whom the film Memento was based.
Alas, they couldn’t. New drug treatment possibilities for Alzheimer's. UC Santa Barbara scientists have made a discovery that has the potential for use in the early diagnosis and eventual treatment of plaque-related diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Type 2 diabetes.
The amyloid diseases are characterized by plaque that aggregates into toxic agents that interact with cellular machinery, explained Michael T. Bowers, lead author and professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. New Alzheimer's Prevention Efforts, And Non-Drug Treatments, Featured At 25th Conference Of Alzheimer's Disease International. LONDON, March 4, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Beneficial Alzheimer's therapies that don't use drugs, and an update on prevention efforts, are the focus of the second day's plenary sessions at the 25th International Conference of Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI), March 12, 2010 at the Grand Hotel Palace, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Prof. Robert Woods of Bangor University, Gwynedd, United Kingdom, says, Psychological therapies have been used with people with dementia for at least 50 years, aiming to improve or maintain cognition, functional abilities, and quality of life, and reduce distress, anxiety, depression and behavioral difficulties. In his presentation at the conference, titled Psychological Interventions with People with Dementia, Woods will share encouraging findings from recent research, including cognitive stimulation and behavioral approaches.
Effect sizes comparable to drug therapies have been reported, with fewer side effects, according to Woods. Prof. Contacts: How My New Favorite Game Can Prevent Alzheimer's And Save The World. Last week I was introduced to an intriguing little brain game that could very well prevent Alzheimer's disease, with the nice side effect of helping to save the world.
The game was demonstrated no less than three times by a commenter on a previous article reading between the lines of some recent science-related news. Alzheimer's and an Arrant Protein (What's the connection?) Sorry..Long - Alzheimer's Disease & Dementia Message Board. Dear Natural 4U Thank you so much for your comments.
It is a blessing to me to finally know that I am not nuts, and that I am validated in some way that Scarpies in sheep and Mad Cow disease and those holes in the brains of those cannibals and in Alzheimer's patients, are somehow all related. Yes, I have had this pent up now for sometime. Part of the anger is that if I...I as a stupid know-nothing housewife. If I, as an uneducated lay-person can connect the dots...then why can not the so-called, self proclaimed professionals? You say that you are not a "victim yet". Age-Related Memory Loss Reversed in Monkeys. It happens to the best of us: you walk into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee but get distracted by the mail, and then forget what you were doing in the first place.
Aging makes people particularly vulnerable to this kind of forgetfulness, where we fail to maintain a thought in the face of distractions. New research from Yale University uncovers cellular changes that seem to underlie this type of memory loss in monkeys, and shows that it can be reversed with drugs. By delivering a certain chemical to the brain, researchers could make neurons in old monkeys behave like those in young monkeys. Clinical trials of a generic drug that mimics this effect are already underway. How Brain Imaging Could Help Predict Alzheimer's. Developing drugs that effectively slow the course of Alzheimer’s disease has been notoriously difficult.
Scientists and drug developers believe that a large part of the problem is that they are testing these drugs too late in the progression of the disease, when significant damage to the brain makes intervention much more difficult. “Drugs like Lilly’s gamma secretase inhibitor failed because they were tested in the wrong group of patients,” says Sangram Sisodia, director of the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. People in the mid or late stages of the disease “are too far gone, there is nothing you can do.” New brain imaging research may help solve that problem. Two studies presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego this week identified changes in the brains of people who would go on to develop the disease. The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper)
Daily dose of beet juice promotes brain health in older adults. Researchers for the first time have shown that drinking beet juice can increase blood flow to the brain in older adults -- a finding that could hold great potential for combating the progression of dementia.
The research findings are available online in Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry, the peer-reviewed journal of the Nitric Oxide Society and will be available in print soon. "There have been several very high-profile studies showing that drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure, but we wanted to show that drinking beet juice also increases perfusion, or blood flow, to the brain," said Daniel Kim-Shapiro, director of Wake Forest University's Translational Science Center; Fostering Independence in Aging.