Word: dementia
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...directed (ludicrously) and promoted (brilliantly) the first grindhouse classics. The 1934 Maniac, about a mad scientist's even daffier assistant whose ailurophobia leads him to rip out a cat's eye and eat it ("Why, it's not unlike an oyster"), pretended to be a serious study of dementia praecox. Esper used the old carny come-on--it's so sinful you have to pay to see it--in Tell Your Children, a silly antidrug screed produced by a Los Angeles church group. After he added some skin, Esper retitled the film Reefer Madness and made a bundle...
When Willem de Kooning died last week at the age of 92, it did not come as a surprise; he had succumbed to senile dementia years before, and a sort of deathwatch had settled over the art world as it observed, at a distance, the slow sinking of the last Abstract Expressionist. Now they were all definitively gone, the artists who put American art on the world map after 1945: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and the transplanted Dutchman who jumped ship into the New World in 1926 and settled in New York...
...colleagues began to understand that Sister Mary was not unique. Out of a group of 61 deceased nuns whose brains showed clear signs of Alzheimer's disease, a large fraction, 19 in all, seemed to have escaped the confusion and memory loss that make this form of dementia so devastating. The reason? As Snowdon and his team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week, these nuns, unlike their counter-parts whose symptoms were severe, had not suffered from strokes--particularly the small strokes so commonplace in the elderly. Only 57% of the stroke-free nuns developed...
...link between stroke and dementia is not new, but seldom has it been called out so clearly. One reason is that Snowdon and his team had access to a sizable control group and thus were able to compare brain tissue of normal people with that of diseased individuals. In 41 nuns who did not have Alzheimer's-like brains, researchers found, strokes caused no measurable decrease in overall mental competence. But in nuns with Alzheimer's, just one or two strokes--small strokes that left swirls of dead tissue no bigger than a pencil tip--were enough to trigger...
...appears to affect tau. Individuals who carry two copies of this gene, Roses has shown, have an elevated risk of developing Alzheimer's before age 70. And if they suffer a stroke, warns another report published in last week's J.A.M.A., they are more likely to develop full-blown dementia...