In the past week, you may have seen a few news headlines that talked about the idea that Alzheimer’s disease may be contagious. I’ve seen headlines like  ”Alzheimer’s Disease Contagious Like Mad Cow,” “Some Cases of Alzheimer’s May Be Transmitted,” and “Can You ‘Catch’ Alzheimer’s Disease?” Those all sound pretty scary, like something out of a [...]

Today I got an email from the Alzheimer’s Association, with an offer for a downloadable paper titled “Generation Alzheimer’s: The Defining Disease of the Baby Boomers.” It’s a sobering look at how the aging of the baby boomers (the first of whom turned 65 earlier this month) will come with an extraordinarily high price in [...]

The beta-amyloid plaques that kill the neural tissue of people with Alzheimer’s disease accumulate in retinal tissue before other parts of the brain.  These plaques usually develop in the brain before there are symptoms of cognitive decline.  Since there is no way to detect plaques in the brain, detection in the retinas would be the [...]

There was a deeply jarring article in the New York Times earlier this week that told the story of an extended Colombian family with unprecedented rates of early-onset Alzheimer’s. How their incredible suffering might hold the key for discovering a cure for Alzheimer’s is the subject of the article. Young people in this family grow [...]

I’d like to share a great educational tool from the Alzheimer’s Association website. It’s a 16-slide Brain Tour that shows the differences between a healthy brain and one with Alzheimer’s. The tour has fantastic roll-over visuals that make it easy to understand what changes in the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient and how it affects [...]

Recently, I read an article about the promise of a nutritional drink called Souvenaid for Alzheimer’s treatment. (My co-worker wrote a great blog post about it a couple of weeks ago.) As reported in CNN, early studies showed the drink had the potential to improve certain types of memory in Alzheimer’s patients. Then I found [...]

This week I’m posting a favorite brain-related TED video each day. In this eye-opening 4 minute talk from TED 2008, biochemist Gregory Petsko argues that between now and 2050, we’ll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, as the world’s population ages.

A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience has provided a new possibility for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) early: loss of the ability to smell. The research used mice that were genetically engineered to develop the signature amyloid plaques that occur in AD. In the course of the research, the scientists noticed that the plaques [...]

Recently, scientists at MIT tested a specially-designed nutritional drink to see whether it could improve cognitive function in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. (Here’s an article in CNN on the subject.) The drink includes three key nutrients: uridine, choline (part of the vitamin B family) and DHA (an omega-3 fatty acid). These are nutrients that [...]