Word: dementias
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Organizing this unlikely choir is Chreanne Montgomery-Smith, who runs support groups for the Newbury branch of Britain's Alzheimer's Society. On cue, the 40 or so Alzheimer's and dementia patients join hands and begin singing in unison - a tentative rendition of Amazing Grace. They remember most of the words and their chorus fills the hall. Montgomery-Smith is certain that the music helps bring her patients' thoughts - ravaged by dissonance and dislocation - into harmony. (Read how secondhand smoke has been linked to dementia...
...though, Montgomery-Smith has been asked by the Alzheimer's Society not to describe this activity - called Singing for the Brain - as "treatment." The scientific data doesn't even support the term "therapeutic." But there are few other dementia therapies that the evidence can validate - currently only two types of drugs have received government approval in the U.S. to slow the progression of Alzheimer's, but both offer only limited benefits - and many caregivers, desperate to better the lives of their patients, resort to such low-tech, behavior-based solutions as singing. (Read "Ginko Biloba Does Not Prevent Alzheimer...
...bedside solutions may actually slow the progression of the disease. If rudimentary tools have any chance of inhibiting the disease, health-care workers are interested. When it comes to Alzheimer's, even incremental improvements can have a profound effect: a 2004 Australian study found that delaying the onset of dementia by five years would eventually halve the number of people living with the condition...
...Cambridge University's Addenbrooke's Hospital, one pilot program has generated a lot more excitement than any new drug or gene discoveries made at the high-tech labs there. (GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies conduct dementia-related research at Addenbrooke's.) Led by a team of clinical psychologists who specialize in rehabilitating brain-injured patients, the program involves using SenseCam, a digital camera, developed by the nearby Microsoft Research Lab, that hangs from the neck and passively takes photographs every 30 seconds. The pictures can then be played back in sequence...
...potential mechanism could be that smoke disrupts the way in which our blood vessels carry blood to the brain," says Sarah Day, head of public health for Britain's Alzheimer's Society. "A type of dementia called vascular dementia is caused by minute hemorrhages in the brain. If smoke is having an effect on the cells in the blood vessel walls, that's a pretty good explanation as to why secondhand smoke would have an effect." (Read "Mild Exercise May Counter Dementia...