The woman who can smell Parkinson’s disease
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...
Category: New research findings
Could lecanemab offer a ray of hope?
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...
Re-imaging my brain in San Francisco
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...
Neuroplasticity and Alzheimer’s
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...
Disappointing results of two human trials of monoclonal antibodies in Parkinson’s disease
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...
Surprisingly good news about the acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (donepezil, rivastigmine, and galantamine)
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 is not dead, but it may be gasping for breath
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...
Negative results from the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative’s (API) Colombian study
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...
Hitting the sweet spot in the spectrum of Alzheimer’s disease for future trials of anti-amyloid medications
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....
We need more sensitive cognitive screening tests – could neural processing speed be the answer?
We know that the neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease can be found in the brain years before the onset of noticeable cognitive impairment. The beta-amyloid plaques start to appear as much as 20 years before...
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