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...
Author: Dan
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,...
Alzheimer’s and work
Wendy Mitchell, in her wonderful book Somebody I Used to Know: A Memoir, tells of her frustration when asking her supervisors in the UK National Health Service for accommodation for her early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Wendy...
Medicare is doing the right thing to limit payment for Aduhelm to participants in approved clinical trials
Ten days ago, officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that Medicare coverage for Aduhelm (aducanumab) would apply only to patients participating in approved clinical trials. Recall that on June...
New healthy aging goal added to the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease
The National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA) was signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011. The act created the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease (and related dementias). The plan has been updated annually,...
Does cataract surgery really decrease the risk of dementia?
Our vision appears to have a complicated relationship to dementia. Posterior cortical atrophy is a rare variant of Alzheimer’s disease in which the amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles first form in the back of...
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