A neurologist's personal battle against Alzheimer's disease
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...
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...
Joy Milne is a 72-year-old retired nurse from Perth, Scotland, who has had an extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell, called hyperosmia, all of her life. In some ways it has been a curse. She...
As I have discussed in previous posts, many drugs designed to remove beta-amyloid from the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease have been designed and tested over the last twenty-plus years. Most of these...
I have loved boats all of my life. When I was a small boy, my father and my great-uncle Fred taught me how to row and sail in a small dinghy. I was in awe of...
In 2015 and again in 2018, I travelled to San Francisco to be a volunteer in a study of a then experimental PET scan for abnormal tau protein in the brain using a radioactive...
This morning I read a fascinating article published yesterday in the New York Times by Helen Santoro, “The Curious Hole in my Head.” Ms. Santoro had some worrying neurological findings at birth prompting a brain scan. This...
Like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder that involves deposits of an abnormal protein in the brain. In Alzheimer’s disease, these abnormal proteins are extracellular beta-amyloid and intraneuronal hyperphosphorylated tau. In Parkinson’s...
Sailing with my friends Henry and John on a chartered sailboat has been an annual treat since 1999. We missed out in 2020 because of Covid, and in 2021 we could not cross over from...
When I first started practicing neurology in 1989, there were absolutely no medications that mitigated cognitive deterioration in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. There were drugs for some of the unwanted symptoms like sleep reversal,...
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