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...caring for someone with dementia, be sure you also take care of yourself--for your own and your patient's sake. Contact the Alzheimer's Association www.alz.org for support groups and adult day-care centers. It also runs an invaluable service called Safe Return, which helps with searches for Alzheimer's patients who wander from home. Whether you suffer dementia or love someone who does, the condition is difficult enough to cope with without trying to face it alone...
...before last fall's discovery that the fetal human brain contains master cells (called neural stem cells) that can grow into any kind of brain cell. Snyder extracted these cells and "mass-produced" them in the lab. His hope is that the cells, when injected into a damaged adult brain, will turn themselves into replacements for cells that are dead or diseased...
When most physicians got their training, they were taught that the adult brain is rigid, that its nerve cells, or neurons, could never regenerate themselves. If you nick your finger with a knife, the cut will heal in a few days because your skin has the ability to generate new cells. But when something bad happens to the brain, it doesn't repair itself. Why's that? "The brain is not plastic," says Snyder. "It doesn't make new cells. You are born with more brain cells than you need, and you lose them progressively and get dumber and dumber...
...path to overturning the dogma of the rigid brain was circuitous. In the early 1960s biologists discovered that new cells were being made in two areas of the adult rat brain, but the discovery was regarded as an unimportant peculiarity of the rodent brain and quickly forgotten. In the mid-1980s, Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University brought new respect to the term birdbrain by demonstrating that the brain of an adult canary has the astonishing ability to regenerate new nerve cells at a rate of up to 20,000 a day. Other researchers reported similar regenerative ability in fish...
...about young adulthood that turns people on to smoking? The intoxicating freedom? The feeling of invincibility? The looming prospect of lung cancer? It may be none of the above, but according to a study released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control, something is turning '90s college-age adults into smokers at a higher rate than their '80s counterparts. Despite success in some population groups, adult smoking rates in the 1990s have remained essentially static, thanks to large numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who are picking up the habit. Between 1965 and 1990, the percentage of Americans...