January 22, 2015

Today's Top Alzheimer's News

USA2 SPOTLIGHT 

A January 22, 2015 Huffington Post article by Marie Marley highlighted ClergyAgainstAlzheimer's new book Seasons of Caring. According to Marley, "Each meditation is one page or less, making reading them easy to fit into your busy life. If you read one every day the book would last you for nearly six months.Dedicated to all who have Alzheimer's and dementia and those who love them, the meditations are grouped into the four seasons of the calendar. Each begins with a Bible verse or other quote relevant to that particular meditation and ends with a brief prayer."


RESEARCH, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY

A January 21, 2015 Genengnews.com article reported on President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative and the promise of large-scale genomic efforts. According to the article, "Obama's initiative won kudos from Research!America, an advocacy group for greater NIH funding. Research!America President and CEO Mary Woolley said in a statement last night that Elder's story "shows that science can deliver breakthroughs for patients with cystic fibrosis, cancer, Alzheimer's and other diseases." “The remarkable ability of our nation’s researchers to advance precision medicine to hone targeted treatments to improve individual patient outcomes is another compelling example of what can be achieved through public-private partnerships,” Woolley stated. In a GEN article last year, Harry Glorikian, senior advisor at the consultancy Precision for Medicine, observed that emerging technologies, big data, and increased pressure to contain health costs are creating a major opportunity advancing precision medicine." Also reported on by The Washington Post.

A January 21, 2015 MIT Technology Review article reported that researchers are combining medical images with genomic data to better define the brain's anatomy. According to the article, "A large network of neuroscientists and doctors that compared over 30,000 brain images with people’s DNA says it’s found several genes that appear to influence the size of brain structures involved in intelligence and memory, as well as the volume of the brain itself…Large studies linking genes with disease have not paid off well in neuroscience. For some common conditions, like depression, there are no convincing DNA clues at all. Instead of giving up, however, some researchers are instead seeking ways to vastly increase the size of studies. In the case of Enigma, that happened by “crowdsourcing” analysis of existing MRI scans. “There are brain images of many kinds on Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and autism that people have collected for decades. There is just astronomical data that is siloed,” says Thompson. The big data approach is in vogue. Last year, the National Institutes of Health awarded Enigma and several other centers $32 million as part of a plan by the funding agency to plow more than half a billion into new ways of exploiting biological data over the next seven years. In an interview last month, Mark Guyer, an adviser to the NIH program, called Big Data to Knowledge, says the agency believed data analysis, not collecting data, was now the “bottleneck” to research."

A January 21, 2015 U.S. News & World Report article reported that new USC research has found that "age-related blood vessel leaks in the brain may contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia." According to the article, "The findings suggest it may be possible to use brain scans to detect such leaks and repair them in order to prevent damage that can lead to dementia, the University of Southern California researchers said. The investigators analyzed contrast-enhanced brain images from 64 people of various ages and found that the brain's protective blood barrier becomes leaky with age. This leakage begins in the hippocampus, an important learning and memory center damaged by Alzheimer's disease. "This is a significant step in understanding how the vascular system affects the health of our brains," said lead investigator Dr. Berislav Zlokovic, director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the university's Keck School of Medicine."


CARE

A January 19, 2015 New York Times article highlighted the complexities of developing an end of life plan for dementia sufferers. According to the article, "Experts know of just a handful of people with directives like Mr. Medalie’s. But dementia rates and numbers have begun a steep ascent, already afflicting an estimated 30 percent of those older than 85. Baby boomers are receiving a firsthand view of the disease’s devastation and burdens as they care for aging parents. They may well prove receptive to the idea that they shouldn’t be kept alive if they develop dementia themselves, predicted Alan Meisel, the director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Bioethics and Health Law…Dementia, though a terminal diagnosis, presents unique obstacles for those who want some control over the way they die. It generally kills slowly, over years, and “there is often no plug to pull,” said Dr. Stanley Terman, a psychiatrist in Carlsbad, Calif., who specializes in end-of-life decision-making and estimates that several hundred people have requested copies of his Natural Dying Living Will. “There’s no high-tech, life-sustaining treatment that can be withdrawn or withheld.””