A recent study showed a high rate of misdiagnosis of dementia when using brief cognitive screening tools. Incredibly, 35.7% of patients were incorrectly classified by at least one of the three screening procedures that were examined. The researchers looked at the well known Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Memory Impairment Screen (MIS) and animal naming…
If you have one copy of a gene called apoE4, then your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease are more than doubled. Moreover, if you carry two copies of apoE4, then you have a 12-fold risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Remarkably, some brilliant researchers have found a way to neutralize apoE4, albeit that the research is…
If you consume drinks that contain artificial sweeteners in preference to those that contain sugar, you have an increased risk of having a stroke or developing dementia. Compared to people who do not drink artificially sweetened drinks, the risk for the most common type of stroke is 2.96 times higher, and for all types of…
Recent research in humans shows that intermittent fasting results in greater diversity of the gut microbiota. Furthermore, intermittent fasting resulted in weight loss, reduced inflammation and enhanced immune response. In particular, intermittent fasting decreased sugar and increased dietary fibre. Unfortunately, human studies on the potential benefits of intermittent fasting for dementia have yet to be…
Toxic air pollution increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The closer you live to major roads, the higher the chances are that you’ll develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but traffic makes no difference to your risk for Parkinson’s disease (PD) or multiple sclerosis (MS). What a remarkable statement!! I love research of this kind; this is…
Could Alzheimer’s disease (AD) be due to a viral cause? This idea links to the importance of olfactory impairment in the early stages of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. A few years ago an editorial was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Many luminaries in the field co-authored the paper. They discussed multiple studies…
Impaired sense of smell (anosmia) is an early warning sign of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Korsakoff’s syndrome, Lewy-body dementia, HIV-related dementia, and multiple sclerosis. Anosmia may occur in other conditions, too, such as diabetes. Anosmia does not affect all patients with neurodegenerative illnesses, but it is nonetheless frequent enough to be…
Oral bacteria in Alzheimer’s brains. Rotten teeth are associated with dementia. Recently, researchers were amazed to find a seven-fold increase in bacterial counts in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The increase was mainly due to the presence of oral bacteria, the bugs that make up the microflora of the mouth. A number of…
