Running on a field of dreams
I love baseball. I was never any good at it myself. I have memories of watching in shame as the ball rolled between my legs in left field. Later, when the pitchers started throwing breaking balls,...
Author: Dan
Estimated cost-effectiveness of anti-amyloid monoclonal antibodies
All of the anti-amyloid monoclonal antibodies currently approved (Aduhelm) or in phase 3 clinical trials (donanemab, lecanumab, and gantenerumab) are effective at removing beta-amyloid from the brain, but effects so far on slowing cognitive...
Can loneliness increase the risk for dementia?
Depression and loneliness are common among people with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, and a recent paper in Neurology suggests that loneliness may actually increase the chance of getting dementia. This was a retrospective analysis of data collected...
The MIND diet revisited
In 2015, the late Dr. Martha Clare Morris and her colleagues at Rush University published their first paper on the effects of following the MIND diet on risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease. The MIND...
Sickening
John Abramson’s new book Sickening is in my opinion the best book written to date about the malignant influence of the pharmaceutical industry on American health care. Dr. Abramson is a Harvard professor who studies and...
Mild COVID has now been shown to be associated with shrinkage of specific brain regions
In an important new study published yesterday in Nature and described in a more accessible form today in the New York Times, researchers studied MRI scans of 785 participants in the UK Biobank. All of these volunteers had...
The magic of a solar eclipse
On August 21, 2017 I witnessed my first and likely my last solar eclipse. Of course, I had read about the mystical power of totality. I came across it for the first time when I...
Smell, disgust and Alzheimer’s
As I describe in Tattoo, my first symptom of Alzheimer’s occurred over fifteen years ago when I first noticed a decrease in my ability to smell and then began to have episodes of illusory odors...
Music and Alzheimer’s Disease
Music has been an important part of my life, almost from the beginning. My mother was a very good, amateur pianist, and I have early memories of trying to emulate her playing. By age...
New twin study informs our understanding of genetic vs modifiable risks for Alzheimer’s
Abnormal tau protein found in neurofibrillary tangles can be found in the brain at least several years before the onset of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. Now a fascinating Dutch study of 78 cognitively normal,...
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