A neurologist's personal battle against Alzheimer's disease
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,...
The amyloid hypothesis has been the dominant theory for the cause of Alzheimer’s disease for over 20 years. In brief, the theory holds that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by accumulation of beta-amyloid that damages...
In 1978, I was in the fifth year of the six-year Medical Scientist Training Program leading to MD and PhD degrees at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a rigorous program, but I...
While enjoying the July 4th holiday on the Oregon Coast with my family this weekend, I reread Thomas DeBaggio’s memoir of his early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. It was published in 2000, two years after his diagnosis...
So far, several trials of anti-amyloid monoclonal antibodies have failed to provide unequivocal evidence of reversing or even slowing cognitive decline in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild Alzheimer’s dementia, despite marked...
My father, Zack Gibbs, was 44 when I was born in 1951. He died of cancer 16 years later at age 60. Throughout his life he had been a tinkerer. He liked to build things...
As I have discussed in previous posts, evidence of beta-amyloid plaques can be found in the brains of people up to 20 years prior to the onset of cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease....
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