Covid and Alzheimer’s disease
One evening last week, I started coughing a bit. I dismissed it as due to my persistent allergies. A few hours later I felt awful. I had a bad headache, shaking chills, and a temperature...
A Tattoo On My Brain Blog
Have You Heard About Greg? – A new documentary film about Greg O’Brien
Last night, my wife Lois and I watched this new documentary film about Greg O’Brien. Although we have never met in person, Greg and I have been email and phone buddies for more than six...
Alzheimer’s dementia or Alzheimer’s disease – what’s the difference and why should we care?
Note: This blog post began life about a year ago as a much shorter post with the same title. A few months later I decided to expand it and submit is as an opinion paper...
Amyloid and tau PET scans of my brain
In 2015 I volunteered for a longitudinal study of a then new tau-PET scan using the radioactive tracer [18F]-AV1451. It has since been approved for commercial use under the name Flortaucipir. Along with the tau...
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...
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...
Saying goodbye to Lizzie G
I have loved boats all of my life. When I was a small boy, my father and my great-uncle Fred taught me how to row and sail in a small dinghy. I was in awe of...
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...
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