A neurologist's personal battle against Alzheimer's disease
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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