Word: dementia
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Some Nobel Prizes have gone to discoveries that turned out to be wrong. The 1926 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Johannes Fibiger for the discovery that roundworms cause cancer (they don't). A year later, psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg won for injecting patients with malaria to treat syphilitic dementia (not a good idea). Past laureates have espoused eugenics, opposed public school, joined the Nazi party and claimed that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job. But the majority of prizes have reflected sound discoveries (X-rays, quantum physics, penicillin) and respected leaders (Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Nelson...
Alzheimer’s is a fatal degenerative disease that can lead to a variety of dementia symptoms, including confusion, irritability, memory loss, and the eventual failure of bodily functions...
Reporting Nov. 18 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Steven DeKosky, dean of the school of medicine at University of Virginia, found that taking 120 mg of gingko biloba twice a day did not prevent the development of dementia in a group of 1,545 seniors 75 years and older; there was no difference in rates of dementia among the intervention group and a similar group of 1,524 participants who took identical placebos. This was the largest and longest investigation into the effects of gingko biloba, and the first study to explore whether a supplement could...
...understandable that so many people would try almost anything, including popping gingko supplements - on which Americans spend more than $100 million annually - in the hopes of holding off the slow and agonizing mental decline that characterizes dementia. The claimed benefits of gingko have mostly been based on the supplement's antioxidant effects, which have been shown in lab studies - but not in patients - to gnaw away at the fatty plaques that infiltrate the Alzheimer's brain and destroy nerve cells. Studies in patients have involved only small groups, making those results interesting but hardly definitive...
...randomized, controlled, double-blinded trial - the most rigorous study of gingko biloba to date. The end result is scientific confidence that the findings are both reliable and reproducible: At the end of six years of follow up, 523 of the more than 3,000 healthy subjects had developed dementia - 277 of those patients had taken gingko, and 246 had received the placebo. Of these cases, 92% were likely in the first phase of Alzheimer's, researchers say. "These results show that gingko doesn't slow down entry into the disease," says DeKosky...