Neurodegenerative disease
purepedantry | March 18, 2009The New Old Age blog at the NYTimes -- hadn't read it before, but I like it -- has a post about reversible causes of cognitive decline in the elderly. I think they make a really good point: there are reversible causes to senility. Not all mental decline in the elderly is "normal" and certainly it is not always Alzheimer's:
But according to the National Institute on Aging, missed diagnoses of reversible dementia still occur too often. "Some physical and mental changes occur with age in healthy people," the agency writes in a publication called "Forgetfulness." "However, much pain and…
purepedantry | December 16, 2008I really love coming to visit you, Grandpa.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales are using sarcasm to determine whether patients have frontotemporal dementia (FTD), otherwise known as Pick's disease:
Researchers at the University of New South Wales found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.
The study, described by its authors as groundbreaking, helps explain why patients with the condition behave the way they do and why, for example, they are unable to…
purepedantry | January 4, 2007This is the question that I get all the time in family gatherings. Well, maybe not in those words. Usually it is phrased as "How can I not get Alzheimer's? Because that would be a bummer...for me..."
People are concerned about the issue of cognitive decline with aging -- both with pathological decline such as Alzheimer's disease and your normal "I can't find my keys" declines. Numerous popular remedies exist that purport to improve your chances of staying with it longer, such as doing crossword puzzles or running ten miles a day for your entire life.
In the late 90s, the National…
purepedantry | December 1, 2006Trushina et al from the Mayo Clinic have made a big advance in understanding the etiology of Huntington's disease.
Huntington's disease is a progressive and ultimately fatal disease that is characterized by uncontrollable limb movements and progressive dementia and psychosis. It is 100% penetrant and shows autosomal dominant inheritance in the causative gene called Huntingtin. We know that Huntingtin has a triplet repeat region -- the same three nucleotides over and over again -- that can be of variable size. Have a relatively short one and you are fine. Have long one and you are going…
purepedantry | November 8, 2006I meant to post this early, but the Neurophilosopher has an excellent history of Alois Alzheimer, for whom the disease is named:
On November 25th, 1901, a 51-year-old woman named Auguste Deter (below right) was admitted to the hospital, and was examined by Alzheimer. Deter at first presented with impaired memory, aphasia, disorientation and psychosocial incompetence (which was, at that time, the legal definition of 'dementia'); her condition gradually worsened, and she started losing other cognitive functions and experiencing hallucinations. Because of her age, Deter was diagnosed with…
purepedantry | August 3, 2006Neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's, were for many years regarded as exclusively diseases of molecular crud. You would look at brains of patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and notice that there were all these aggregates of protein crud forming in specific locations. This led scientists to conclude that the crud must be causing the neurons to do die through a mechanism that was not at the time clear.
The reality we are learning is far more complicated.
There is a form of inherited Parkinson's disease that is caused by loss-of-function mutations in the gene…