Category: Dementia

Contrary to popular belief, this supplement doesn’t prevent cognitive decline.

In one of the largest and longest studies to date, no evidence was found that omega-3 can protect against cognitive decline.

However, the supplement is likely to be beneficial in many other ways, including for eye health.

Dr Emily Chew, who led the study, said:

“Contrary to popular belief, we didn’t see any benefit of omega-3 supplements for stopping cognitive decline.”

The study was originally designed to look at the potential benefits of taking nutritional supplements on the eyes.

The findings for this were positive, Dr Chew explained:

“We’ve seen data that eating foods with omega-3 may have a benefit for eye, brain, and heart health.”

But the researchers found that omega-3 had no beneficial effects on cognitive decline.

Cognitive decline is particularly important as it has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

For the study, scientists followed 4,000 seniors over five years.

Despite the results, Dr Lenore Launer, a study author, does not rule out the possibility that omega-3 might still be beneficial for brain health:

“It may be, for example, that the timing of nutrients, or consuming them in a certain dietary pattern, has an impact.

More research would be needed to see if dietary patterns or taking the supplements earlier in the development of diseases like Alzheimer’s would make a difference.”

The research was published in JAMA (Chew et al., 2015).

Brain aging image from Shutterstock

Test identifies smaller brain volume and problems with thinking.

A simple saliva test could help identify thinking problems in older people, a new study finds.

The study found a connection between the stress hormone cortisol and thinking skills.

Higher cortisol levels in the evening were linked to worse thinking skills and smaller brain volumes.

Dr Lenore J. Launer, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Studies have shown that depression increases the risk for dementia, but we don’t know much about how this relationship occurs.

High levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found in people with depression, and the theory is that cortisol has a toxic effect on the hippocampus area of the brain, which plays an important role in memory.”

The study included data from 4,244 people who did not have dementia.

Dr Launer said:

“Since this study just looked at a snapshot in time, we don’t know which came first: the high levels of cortisol or the loss of brain volume.

It’s possible that the loss of brain volume that can occur with aging leads to a lesser ability of the brain to stop the effects of cortisol, which in turn leads to further loss of brain cells.

Understanding these relationships may help us develop strategies to reduce the effects of cortisol on the brain and thinking skills.”

The research was published in the journal Neurology (Mirjam et al., 2015).

Thinking image from Shutterstock

Given the power of modern medicine, why have brain diseases increased by four times?

Rates of brain diseases are increasing at almost epidemic rates, especially in the US, a new study reports.

Researchers have compared figures for neurological disease from 1989 with those from 2010 across 21 Western countries.

They found that dementia is starting, on average, a decade earlier in 2010 than it was in 1989.

In the US, the figures are particularly worrying.

Women over 75 are suffering five times as many neurological deaths as they were two decades ago.

The same comparison for men over 75 shows a three-fold increase in neurological deaths.

Professor Colin Pritchard, who led the study, said:

“The rate of increase in such a short time suggests a silent or even a ‘hidden’ epidemic, in which environmental factors must play a major part, not just aging.

Modern living produces multi-interactional environmental pollution but the changes in human morbidity, including neurological disease is remarkable and points to environmental influences.”

Professor Pritchard continued:

“In part, some of the results are explained by more effective treatments for cancer and heart disease, with advances in medicine making such physical illnesses easier to treat, whilst there have been less advances in the treatment of neurological conditions.

Crucially it is not just because people are living longer to get diseases they previously would not have lived long enough to develop but older people are developing neurological disease more than ever before.

The environmental changes in the last 20 years have seen increases in the human environment of petro-chemicals — air transport- quadrupling of motor vehicles, insecticides and rises in background electro-magnetic-field, and so on.

These results will not be welcome news as there are many with short-term vested interests that will want to ignore them.

It is not that we want to stop the modern world but rather make it safer.

Essentially, it is time for us to wake up and realize that a major problem we now face is unprecedented levels of neurological disease, not just the earlier dementias and thinking of the USA — `when America sneezes, Europe gets cold a decade later.”

The study was published in the journal Surgical Neurology International (Pritchard & Rosenorn-Lanng, 2015).

Brain image from Shutterstock

Vessels discovered in the brain that were thought not to exist — could revolutionise study of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.

The brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist, new research reports.

The finding means the textbooks will have to be rewritten.

Discovery of the vessels may also revolutionise the study of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism.

Professor Jonathan Kipnis, who led the research, was initially sceptical about the results:

“I really did not believe there are structures in the body that we are not aware of.

I thought the body was mapped.

I thought that these discoveries ended somewhere around the middle of the last century.

But apparently they have not.”

The vessels are located in the meninges — the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.

The vessels run near major blood vessels, which partly explains why they have been so difficult to find.

The left-hand image below shows the old map of the lymphatic system and the updated version is on the right.

The discovery will likely have profound implications for how scientists study the neuro-immune system, Professor Kipnis said:

“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?’ now we can approach this mechanistically.

Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels.

It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction.

We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied.

But now we can ask mechanistic questions.

We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role.

Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.

In Alzheimer’s, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain.

We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels.”

The study was published in the journal Nature (Louveau et al., 2015).

Network brain image from Shutterstock and lympatic system image from University of Virginia Health System

How coffee intake affects the chance of developing mild cognitive impairment.

Drinking one or two cups of coffee a day can protect the brain against a precursor to dementia, a new study finds.

More coffee, though, does not lead to a higher neuro-protective effect.

In fact, the study found that people who increased their consumption by a cup or two had twice the risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

MCI is a common precursor to developing forms of dementia, like Alzheimer’s disease.

Symptoms of MCI include minor memory problems and slowed thinking and judgement.

The Italian study of 1,445 people also found that people not drinking coffee were at higher risk than those who drank moderate amounts.

The study’s authors write:

“These findings from the Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging suggested that cognitively normal older individuals who never or rarely consumed coffee and those who increased their coffee consumption habits had a higher risk of developing MCI.

Therefore, moderate and regular coffee consumption may have neuroprotective effects also against MCI confirming previous studies on the long-term protective effects of coffee, tea, or caffeine consumption and plasma levels of caffeine against cognitive decline and dementia,”

Participants in the study were aged 65 to 84-years-old.

They were followed up over an average of 3.5 years to see if they had developed any thinking problems.

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Solfrizzi et al., 2015).

Image credit: Eric

Michael J Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s, is an advocate for research into the disease.

Drugs currently used to treat malaria could also provide a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, a new study reports.

Parkinson’s disease is caused by a loss of cells in part of the brain called the substantia nigra.

This leads to a reduction in the production of a neurotransmitter called dopamine.

Since dopamine helps regulate movement, Parkinson’s causes tremors and involuntary movements, as well as stiff and inflexible muscles, among other symptoms.

The new research, carried out by researchers in the US and Singapore, could be a breakthrough.

Dr Yoon Ho Sup, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our discovery brings hope for the millions of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, as the drugs that we have found to have worked in the laboratory tests have already been used to treat malaria in patients for decades.

Our research also shows that existing drugs can be repurposed to treat other diseases and once several potential drugs are found, we can redesign them to be more effective in combating their targeted diseases while reducing the side effects.”

The two anti-malaria drugs, Chloroquine and Amodiaquine, were among around 1,000 tested.

Rats with Parkinson’s showed improvements in their behaviour and no signs of the disease after being treated with the drug.

Professor Kwang-Soo Kim, another of the study’s authors, and expert on Parkinsons’, explained some of the problems with existing treatments:

“…[existing] pharmacological and surgical treatments address the patient’s symptoms, such as to improve mobility functions in the early stages of the disease, but the treatments cannot slow down or stop the disease process.

Backed by various lines of scientific evidence, Nurr1 is known to be a potential drug target to treat Parkinson’s.

Despite great efforts from pharmaceutical companies and academia, no one has managed to find a molecule which can directly bind to it and activate it, except for us.”

It is hoped these drugs can be modified to provide a better treatment for Parkinson’s than those that already exist.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Kim et al., 2015).

Michael J Fox image from Shutterstock 

Tests predict ten-fold increase in Alzheimer’s risk 18 years in advance.

Low scores on memory and thinking tests could signal Alzheimer’s 18 years in advance, a new study finds.

Dr Kumar B. Rajan, the study’s lead author, said:

“The changes in thinking and memory that precede obvious symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease begin decades before.

While we cannot currently detect such changes in individuals at risk, we were able to observe them among a group of individuals who eventually developed dementia due to Alzheimer’s.”

In the study, over two thousand people from Chicago were given tests of memory and thinking every three years over 18 years.

Around one in five of the participants, whose average age was 73, developed the disease during the study.

Lower scores on the tests predicted a ten-fold increase in the risk of developing the disease.

Relatively small decreases in performance on the test were linked to large increases in Alzheimer’s risk.

Dr Rajan said:

“A general current concept is that in development of Alzheimer’s disease, certain physical and biologic changes precede memory and thinking impairment.

If this is so, then these underlying processes may have a very long duration.

Efforts to successfully prevent the disease may well require a better understanding of these processes near middle age.”

The study was published in the journal Neurology (Rajan et al., 2015).

Alzheimer’s photo from Shutterstock