The Bilingual Have The Edge In Staving Off Alzheimer’s Disease

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Posted on 19th February 2011 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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New research has found that being bilingual can help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Associated Press. 

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/18/v-print/2073892/speaking-2-languages-may-delay.html

The study was conducted by Ellen Bialystock, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto. Her research was sparked by what we know about babies, which is that just talking to them in two languages prompts them to learn both tongues in the time it takes most babies to learn one.

The belief is that the babies’ brains become better equipped to multitask. So Bialystock decided to look into the impact of knowing two languages on the elderly.

Her research involved 450 Alzheimer’s patients, who were all at the same level when diagnosed. Half of them had spoken two languages for much of their lives, while the rest only spoke one language.

The bilingual patients started to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s and were diagnosed with it four to five years later than those who spoke only one language, Bialystock reported at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Of course, being bilingual doesn’t mean you wanted get Alzheimer’s. But the belief is when you know two languages, the brain must always be working to inhibit one, and that activity helps keep you sharp.

FDA Moves Closer To Approving First Alzheimer’s Detection Test For The Living

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Posted on 22nd January 2011 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee has recommended that the agency approve a scan that can detect plaques — in the brain of a live person — that are markers for Alzheimer’s disease, The New York Times reported Friday.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/health/21alzheimers.html?src=me&ref=general

The FDA typically heeds the advice of its advisory committees, which means that it’s likely that Avid Radiopharmacueticals will win approval to market the scans. According to The Times, certain plaques are considered a medical criteria for having Alzheimer’s disease. A person who loses his or her memory is not diagnosed with Alzheimers’s unless they have the plaques.

Previously, the only way to confirm that there were plaques in a person’s brain was through an autopsy. But the new scan will permit doctors to detect the plaques in the living.

Avid, a unit of Eli Lilly & Co., has a dye tht makes plaque visible during PET scans.

Even though the is no cure for Alzheimer’s, the new scan is considered an important tool to correctly diagnosing, and manage, a patient’s illness. Doctors would learn for certain if a patient’s memory failure and other cognitive problens were being caused by Alzheimer’s or another type of disease, or from a stroke.

FDA To Consider How Important Tests Are for Alzheimer’s, A Disease With No Cure

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Posted on 20th January 2011 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Depending on who you believe in the media, we are coming closer to having methods to determine if someone has Alzheimer’s disease — or federal regulators are unimpressed with at least one of the potential solutions.

The New York Times Wednesday ran an upbeat story with the headline “Two Tests Could Aid In Risk Assessment And Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.”    

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/health/research/19alzheimers.html?_r=1&ref=us

The Times noted that one new study had evaluated a new kind of brain scan that detects the plaques in the brain that are characteristic of Alzheimers’. On Thursday a Food and Drug Administration committee is scheduled to review that study and recommend whether that test should get the go-ahead to be marketed.

The new brain scan involves what The Times described as a dye created by Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, which is part of Eli Lilly & Co. That dye is supposed to attach to the plaque in the brain, beta amyloid, “lighting” it up so that it becomes visible in PET scans.

In contrast to the upbeat report in The Times, The Wall Street Journal said the dye that finds plaque, which it named as the drug Amyvid, was being given a dim eye by the FDA committee. The Journal, in a story headlined “FDA Skeptical About Detecting Alzheimer’s,” reported that two FDA reviewers are recommending that Amyvid not be approved.     

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704678004576090320296403228.html?KEYWORDS=alzheimer%27s

At least two FDA reviewers questioned the need for the new scan since there isn’t even a cure for Alzheimer’s yet. And according to The Journal, the first question the FDA will be asked to address Thursday is “whether knowledge of brain amyloid plaque would have ‘clinical usefulness.'” 

 

A second study investigated whether a blood test can detect the presence of the protein that comprises Alzheimer’s plaque, beta amyloid, according to The Times. 

The studies were reported Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.     

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/305/3/261.full

 

 

China Tries To Cope With Its Elderly With Alzheimer’s Disease

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Posted on 17th January 2011 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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 With America’s Baby Boomers aging, maybe we should pay attention to what China is doing to care for its “exploding elderly population,” according to The New York Times. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/world/asia/13shanghai.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=alzheimer’s%20disease&st=cse

In cities such as Shanghai, China has begun building nursing homes with multitudes of amenities — such as movies houses, beauty salons, game rooms and karaoke suites — for those with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

In its Page One story last Thursday, headlined “China, In A Shift To Acceptance, Takes On Its Alzheimer’s Problem,” says that China within 30 years will likely have almost 400 million people older than 60.

Instead of being ashamed when a family member has Alzheimer’s, or putting them in hospital psychiatric wards, China is starting to construct more nursing homes to deal with its elders suffering from dementia. In Shanghai, which has an estimated 120,000 residents with dementia or Alzheimer’s, there are plans to build a nursing home in each of the city’s districts. Shanghai will need 5,000 more beds each year, according to The Times.

China’s problems dealing with its aged have been exacerbated by its policy limiting couples to having only one child. That means that a single Chinese person will be expected to support and care for two parents and four grandparents, The Times reported.    

Possible Connection Seen Between Vets’ Post Traumatic Stress Disorder And Alzheimer’s Disease

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Posted on 13th June 2010 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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A recent study has found an apparent link between post traumatic stess disorder, PTSD, and Alzheimer’s disease in older veterans.

 http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20100607/posttraumatic-stress-disorder-linked-to-dementia

The research was described as the first to find a connection between combat-related PTSD and late-life dementia. It found  a significant increase in the likelihood of developing dementia — nearly  twice as high — for ex-solidiers who have PTSD compared to those who don’t.

Deborah Barnes at the University of California in San Francisco conducted the research, with her team keeping track of more than 180,000 veterans for seven years. Of that group, more than 53,000 had been diagnosed with PTSD.

Nobody in the group had dementia in late 2000, but by late 2007 about 31,000, or 17 percent, developed faulty memories and cognitive disorders.  As it turned out, the veterans with PTSD had roughly an 11 percent chance of getting dementia over the seven-year period of the study, compared with 7 percent for vets who don’t suffer from PTSD.

And after doing some adjustments of risk factors, the study determined that the veterans with PTSD were 77 percent more likely to get dementia than vets without PTSD.

Barnes’ study was financed by the Department of Defense and the National Institute on Aging, and was published in the June issue of the journal “Archives of General Psychiatry.” 

 http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/67/6/608

 The study, however, is not definitive, according to Barnes. For example, it remains unclear if suffering from PTSD multiplies veterans’ risk for dementia as they  grow older, or if recurring PTSD is an early symptom of dementia in older veterans.