Must reads

• A December 15, 2014 Wall Street Journal article reported that hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb is making a $15 million gift to establish the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s disease at the  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. According to the article, "The center is named for Mr. Loeb’s father, who died in 2012 at the age of 79. The older Mr. Loeb lived with Alzheimer’s for eight years before dying from a heart attack, said his son…The gift from Mr. Loeb will enable researchers to take a new approach to drug development, according to Kenneth L. Davis, the president and chief executive of Mount Sinai and an expert in Alzheimer’s. Instead of looking at genes that might be risk factors that cause or increase the likelihood of Alzheimer’s, said Dr. Davis, Mount Sinai researchers will be able to look at the protective genes that facilitate resistance to the disease. Dr. Davis said this kind of research is high-risk and not normally federally funded. The end goal of the work, he said, is to develop a drug." [pdf attached]
• A December 15, 2014 MSNBC opinion piece by Dr. Howard Fillit, chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, underscored the need for coordinated Alzheimer's care management. According to Dr. Fillit, "All of us — future patients, caregivers, policy makers and health care providers — should be pushing to right our priorities. The National Alzheimer’s Project Act is a good step in the right direction but much more needs to be done. Physicians and other providers need incentives for the time and effort required to provide quality and expert care for people with Alzheimer’s. Chronic care management and home care needs to be adequately reimbursed and available so that most patients can get long term care at home, preventing hospitalizations and other unnecessary costs. New models of coordinated team care for people with Alzheimer’s are needed that can address these multidisciplinary challenges. Until we actually change the system of care, families with Alzheimer’s will continue to struggle to find the care they need — and even well-known patients with considerable personal resources will be at risk to wander the streets of their city all night, scared and lost in the fog of this dreadful disease."

• A December 15, 2014 Forbes article reported that "Tony Coles, the chief executive who sold Onyx Pharmaceuticals to Amgen for $10.4 billion in 2013, is starting a new company that will use yeast to try and discover new treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis." According to the article, "The new startup, Yumanity, will be based in Cambridge, Mass., and is built around technologies developed by Susan Lindquist, the former director of the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research…Three specific technologies were created at the Lindquist lab that may allow drug researchers to search more effectively for drugs against neurodegenerative diseases. In all of these disorders, proteins that play important roles in the brain become mis-folded – they are literally misshapen."
• A December 15, 2014 Washington Post article highlighted the differences between Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. According to the article, "My mother’s greatest fear was Alzheimer’s. She got Lewy body dementia, or LBD, instead. This little known, oddly named, debilitating illness afflicts an estimated 1.3 million Americans, the actor and comedian Robin Williams possibly among them. It is often misdiagnosed because its signs, such as hallucinations and body rigidity, do not seem like those of dementia, but in the end it robs people of themselves even more painfully…Although LBD is the second-most-common type of dementia after Alzheimer’s, it is often misidentified. It is caused when abnormal protein particles called Lewy bodies (named after Frederic H. Lewy, who discovered them in 1912) accumulate in the brain. Lewy body protein deposits disrupt the brain’s normal functioning."
• A December 15, 2014 The Atlantic article reported on the "myth of the brain game." According to the article, "Brain games aren’t a complete waste of time. They provide mental stimulation, the kind that doctors advise the elderly to get from crosswords and other mind games. They are fun, engaging, even competitive. They show how we can train the brain to get better at a task with repeated practice. But these are fairly obvious results given what we know about the brain's plasticity. The larger question (and promise) is whether playing on a phone for 15 minutes each day can help us in other aspects of our lives that we haven't been training for…All that said, the things that do help shape a healthy brain are the things that have been tried and tested for years. Physical fitness forces more blood to flow into the brain, allowing for more neural connections. So exercise works, as does conventional training in reading and language skills for children with reading-comprehension and oral language difficulties."