Hearing loss, aphasia and dementia
Over the last ten years or so, I have noticed increasing trouble understanding what people are saying to me, especially if there are several people speaking at the same time, like at a family...
Author: Dan
Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease
Early in my career as a general neurologist, there was no way to accurately make a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in a living patient. The only way then to know for sure that a...
A fatal case of multiple brain hemorrhages associated with lecanemab
Today the FDA granted accelerated approval of the anti-amyloid monoclonal antibody lecanemab, now going by the trade name Leqembi. I have mixed feelings about this. Lecanemab is the only disease-modifying drug so far to...
Boxing Day
One Christmas while I was in medical school in Atlanta, Lois and I decided to visit London rather than return to the West Coast to visit our families. It was a memorable week in many...
What about exercise and meditation for elders worried about their cognitive function?
My friend Ron Louie is a pediatric oncologist and fulltime caregiver for his wife who has Alzheimer’s disease. He blogs regularly, often drawing intriguing comparisons of the search for an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s...
Apolipoprotein-4 (APOE-4): bad for the brain and bad for the heart
At some point while I was a medical student in the 1970s, I had my cholesterol checked. I think it was part of a pedagogical exercise, and as I recall, only the total cholesterol...
Covid and Alzheimer’s disease
One evening last week, I started coughing a bit. I dismissed it as due to my persistent allergies. A few hours later I felt awful. I had a bad headache, shaking chills, and a temperature...
Have You Heard About Greg? – A new documentary film about Greg O’Brien
Last night, my wife Lois and I watched this new documentary film about Greg O’Brien. Although we have never met in person, Greg and I have been email and phone buddies for more than six...
Alzheimer’s dementia or Alzheimer’s disease – what’s the difference and why should we care?
Note: This blog post began life about a year ago as a much shorter post with the same title. A few months later I decided to expand it and submit is as an opinion paper...
Amyloid and tau PET scans of my brain
In 2015 I volunteered for a longitudinal study of a then new tau-PET scan using the radioactive tracer [18F]-AV1451. It has since been approved for commercial use under the name Flortaucipir. Along with the tau...
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