Word: dementias
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Adding to the deep body of research associating mental acuity with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, a study published online on July 8 by the journal Neurology suggests that people who possess sophisticated linguistic skills early in life may be protected from developing dementia in old age - even when their brains show the physical signs, like lesions and plaques, of memory disorders...
That discrepancy is not unheard of: many elderly patients develop the brain lesions, plaques and tangled neurological-tissue fibers that are indicative of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, but not all of them exhibit the memory loss and confusion that typically characterize these disorders. In fact, the number of such patients may be greater than researchers first thought. In a November 2008 study, a team of scientists used a new positron emission tomography (PET) brain-imaging technique developed by Drs. William Klunk and Chester Mathis of the University of Pittsburgh to image the brains of live patients - a leap forward...
...study may not be familiar to most people outside of élite neurology circles, but to dementia researchers, it's a gold mine. The long-term data on more than 600 nuns from Minnesota has revealed a great many insights about the effects of aging and the development of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And yet it was not in the Nun study's core data that its director, Dr. David Snowdon, first discovered a fascinating correlation between the sisters' language skills, based on essays they had written in their 20s when they first entered the convent (Snowdon discovered...
Iacono effectively picked up where Snowdon left off. Iacono and his colleagues discovered that not only did nuns who avoided dementia later in life have 20% higher linguistic scores as young women, compared with peers who developed symptoms of cognitive decline, but that the relationship held up even in nuns whose brains showed all the physical signs of Alzheimer's. "There is a special group of people who have comparable amount of plaques and tangles - the typical marks of the disease - without the cognitive impairment," says Iacono. "[It appears that] people with higher linguistic scores were protected even...
...Dementia sets in: HEF says he can't tell his twin girlfriends apart...