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Memory loss is not enough for a diagnosis of the dreaded disease. Relying on clinical symptoms of memory loss to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease may miss other forms of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s that don’t initially affect memory, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study, according to newswise.com. “These individuals are often overlooked in clinical trial designs and are missing out on opportunities to participate in clinical trials to treat Alzheimer’s,” says first study author Emily Rogalski, associate professor at Northwestern’s Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center. Now here's the truly scary part. There is more than one kind of Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer’s can cause language problems, disrupt an individual’s behavior, personality and judgment or even affect someone’s concept of where objects are in space. If it affects personality, it may cause lack of inhibition. “Someone who was very shy may go up to grocery store clerk -- who is a...

Probably one of the very hardest parts of a loved one being affected by Alzheimer's is his ability to no longer recognize you.   That's because the disease not only impairs memory but it also interferes with visual perception, according to newswise.com.  Face perception plays a fundamental role in human communication, which is why humans have evolved into experts at quickly detecting and identifying faces, the website reports in a story about a new study. This faculty is thought to depend on the ability to perceive a face as a whole. Also known as “holistic perception,” this ability is in contrast to the local and detailed analysis required to perceive individual facial features, such as the eyes, nose or mouth. The study has demonstrated that the holistic ability to perceive faces is impaired by Alzheimer’s disease.  For the study, the research team recruited people with Alzheimer’s along with healthy seniors to study their ability to perceive faces and ca...

My husband is going to love this.  He'd live on seafood if he could.  Every week when we go out he orders a shrimp cocktail, then has a salad with salmon. He does it because he loves it but now there's an even better reason. Eating seafood just might protect you from Alzheimer's. A new study has found that older adults with a major risk gene for Alzheimer’s disease who ate at least one seafood serving per week showed fewer signs of Alzheimer’s-related brain changes. In contrast, this association was not found in the brains of volunteers who ate fish weekly but did not carry the risk gene. The researchers also examined the brains for levels of mercury, which can be found in seafood and is known to be harmful to the brain and nervous system. They found that seafood consumption was associated with increased mercury levels in the brains but not the amount of beta amyloid protein plaques and tau protein tangles, the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. The study's purp...

Uh oh. Just when I thought I was getting out of the woods as a potential Alzheimer's patient, now a new study is saying that older women (ok, so I'm not over 70 or anywhere near it) with memory complaints may well be on their way to this dreaded disease. According to newswise.com, new research suggests that older women who complain of memory problems may be at higher risk for experiencing diagnosed memory and thinking impairment decades later. I drew a complete blank when trying to come up with my allergist's name for another doctor.  Usually the name will come to me sometime over the next hours or days.  But this one didn't.  Then I panicked when my son and I were listening to music and I wanted to tell him about a singer who sounded just like the person singing.  And I couldn't for the life of me remember her name. (I knew the first name, "Phoebe."  But the rest totally eluded me.  I came up with "Swann" but I knew that wasn't ri...

I had it again last night. The dream where I park my car, then go back to find it and it's gone.  I wander around and around but never find it again. Now a new study has me thinking I'm developing Alzheimer's. Well, not really.  But researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have induced this all-too-common human experience – or a close version of it – permanently in rats and from what is observed, hope they can perhaps derive clues about why strokes and Alzheimer's disease can destroy a person’s sense of direction, according to newswise.com. Scientists have developed a micro-surgical procedure that makes it possible to remove the area of the rat’s brain that contains grid cells and show what happens to this hard-wired navigational system when these grid cells are wiped out. One effect, not surprisingly, is that the rats become very poor at tasks requiring internal map-making skills, such as remembering the location of a resti...

We just don't get a break. A new study is saying that worry, jealousy and moodiness in women are linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's. Now if only the men in our lives weren't causing us to have these emotions!  Just kidding. But it's a fairly serious finding.  Women who are anxious, jealous, or moody and distressed in middle age may be at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in life, according to a nearly 40-year-long study, according to newswise.com. “Most Alzheimer’s research has been devoted to factors such as education, heart and blood risk factors, head trauma, family history and genetics,” said study author Lena Johannsson, PhD, of the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden. “Personality may influence the individual’s risk for dementia through its effect on behavior, lifestyle or reactions to stress.” For the study, 800 women with an average age of 46 were followed for 38 years and given personality tests that looked...

First I didn't have to worry about it.  Now it seems I do. If you keep forgetting where your keys and glasses are, you just might, after all, have the beginnings of Alzheimer's . At least, that's what a new study is saying. According to newswise.com, new research by scientists at the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging suggests that people who notice their memory is slipping may be on to something.  The study appears to confirm that self-reported memory complaints are strong predictors of clinical memory impairment later in life. Researchers asked 531 people with an average age of 73 and free of dementia if they had noticed any changes in their memory in the prior year. The participants were also given annual memory and thinking tests for an average of 10 years. After death, participants' brains were examined for evidence of Alzheimer's disease. During the study, 56 percent of the participants reported changes in their memor...

Do crossword puzzles.  Read the daily newspaper (blog?).  Exercise. These have all been recommended to those who wish to try to ward off Alzheimer's.  But exercise is the number one solution, experts have been saying for some time. Now a new study proves it even more.  According to Gretchen Reynolds at The New York Times, "Exercise may help to keep the brain robust in people who have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to an inspiring new study. The findings suggests that even moderate amounts of physical activity may help to slow the progression of one of the most dreaded diseases of aging."  About 100 people between 65 and 89 were recruited for the study, many with a family history of Alzheimer's, making them more vulnerable to this dreaded disease. Reynolds notes that scientists have discovered in recent years that people who harbor a specific variant of a gene have a substantially increased risk of developing the dis...

Depressed? Don't exercise much?  Have high blood pressure?  A new study has found that, even if you're just18, your memory could start failing.  Even worse, it may put you at higher risk for Alzheimer's later in life. UCLA researchers and the Gallup organization polled more than 18,000 people about their memory and a variety of lifestyle and health factors previously shown to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, according to newswise.com. They found that many of these risk factors increased the likelihood of self-perceived memory complaints across all adult age groups. If you have high blood pressure , you're at even greater risk. New research suggests that high blood pressure in middle age plays a critical role in whether blood pressure in old age may affect memory and thinking. Risk factors in the population studied -- people ages 18-99 -- included depression, lower education levels, physical inactivity, high blood pressure, diabetes, o...

One of the worst things about Alzheimer's disease has always been that there's no way to prevent it.  But that may be changing.  A new study has found that a protein may inhibit the beginning of the disease. According to newswise.com, scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center have identified a compound in animal studies that reduced by more than half the levels of amyloid ( a starchlike protein that is deposited in the liver, kidneys, spleen, or other tissues in certain diseases) proteins in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers hope that someday a treatment based on the molecule could be used to ward off the neuro-degenerative disease since it may be safe enough to be taken daily over many years. Amyloid beta contributes to the plaques that develop in the Alzheimer's brain.  “What we want in an Alzheimer’s preventive is a drug that modestly lowers amyloid beta and is also safe for long-term use,” the Web site quotes Martin J. Sadows...

Antidepressants have helped millions feel better about their lives.  And now they may play an even bigger role in making us feel good.  They may prevent Alzheimer's. A new study has found that a  commonly prescribed antidepressant can reduce production of the main ingredient in Alzheimer’s brain plaques, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania. Stopping plaque buildup may halt the disastrous mental decline caused by the disorder. Newswise.com reports that this research  supports preliminary mouse studies that evaluated a variety of antidepressants. The scientists found that the antidepressant citalopram (or Celexa) stopped the growth of plaques in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. And in young adults who were cognitively healthy, a single dose of the antidepressant lowered by 37 percent the production of amyloid beta, the primary ingredient in plaques. "Although the findings ...

So what can't coffee do? It wakes us up, maybe wards off diabetes , even Alzheimer's . And now it can help us behave more ethically, according to smartplanet.com. A new study has found that coffee can help sleep-deprived employees resist the urge to go along with unethical behavior.  In an experiment, those who chewed caffeinated gum were less likely go along with deception than the group who chewed regular gum. Alyson Windsor reports that researchers found that their findings built upon previous research by two of the authors who'd found that lack of sleep can make workers more susceptible to social influence, less able to regulate their emotions and more likely to make or go along with unethical choices in the workplace. She adds, in a press release , David Welsh, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Washington, said “When you’re sleep deprived at work, it’s much easier to simply go along with unethical suggestions from your boss because res...

Wonderful.  Something new for women over 60 to worry about (and maybe stop worrying about, too).  You're far more likely to develop Alzheimer's than breast cancer.  (Guess I'm OK.  I had breast cancer at 50.) A new study has found that one in eight women will develop breast cancer over their lifetimes, but for Alzheimer's? It's one in six, according to CNN.com. And for men?  Only one out of 11 men over 60 will develop Alzheimer's. How do we always manage to get the short end of the stick?!   Age is the greatest risk factor for gender differences among Alzheimer's patients, but it's not the only reason. Researchers are also looking at genetic and hormonal differences, according to Maria Carrillo, vice president of medical and scientific relations for the Alzheimer's Association , CNN reports. The disease affects more than 5 million Americans, two-thirds of them women. The new details about this disease and its impact on women come from a surv...

Who isn't afraid of Alzheimer's? Since I hang out now with a lot of people of "a certain age," it's something that's talked about a lot. Now a new study is saying that variations in eye structure and function may reveal early signs of this dreaded disease. According to newswise.com, " Investigators at the  Cedars-Sinai   Regenerative Medicine Institute  have discovered eye abnormalities that may help reveal features of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Using a novel laboratory rat model of Alzheimer’s disease and high-resolution imaging techniques, researchers correlated variations of the eye structure, to identify initial indicators of the disease." “Detecting changes in the brain that indicate Alzheimer’s disease can be an extremely challenging task,” the Web site quotes  Shaomei Wang, MD, PhD , lead author of the study and an associate professor in the Regenerative Medicine Institute and  Department of Biomedical Sciences . “By using the eye ...

Could we be diagnosed with Alzehimer's in time to stave it off?  Well, not yet, but scientists say b rain imaging using radioactive dye can detect early evidence of Alzheimer's disease that may predict future cognitive decline among adults with mild or no cognitive impairment. As newswise.com reports, a Duke University study confirms earlier work that  identified "silent beta-amyloid plaque build-up in the brain (that) could help guide care and treatment decisions for patients at risk for Alzheimer's." “Our research found that healthy adults and those with mild memory loss who have a positive scan for these plaques have a much faster rate of decline on memory, language and reasoning over three years,” the Web site quotes lead author P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., professor of psychiatry and director of the neurocognitive disorders program at Duke. The disease currently affects an astounding 5 million people in the U.S. today and was recently moved to the head ...

There's been some talk about moving cancer from the second highest cause of death to first place. But what's even more astounding is that Alzheimer' s has now moved into third. According to The Washington Post, Alzheimer's used to be the sixth  leading cause of death, but experts are now taking a step back because the stats may be wrong -- many more people may have it than is reported. Tara Bahrampour writes, "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists Alzheimer’s as the sixth-leading cause of death, far below heart disease and cancer. But the  new report , published Wednesday in the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, suggests that the current system of relying on death certificates for causes misses the complexity of dying for many older people and underestimates the impact of Alzheimer’s." She adds that, w hile the CDC attributed about 84,000 deaths in 2010 to Alzheimer’s, the report estimated that number to be a whopping 5...

Uh oh.  I knew it.  New studies are showing that people who think they might -- or develop -- Alzheimer's may be right. According to newswise.com, "A  recent study suggests that self-reported memory complaints might predict clinical memory impairment later in life." For the study, a researcher asked over 3,000 men 60 and older, " Have you noticed any change in your memory since you last came in?" Now I'm not 60 yet but if you asked my son how many times I forgot to bring his strawberries after I cut them to him, well, never mind.  Let's just say it's a lot. "It seems that subjective memory complaint can be predictive of clinical memory impairment," said  one of the study authors. In other words, if you think you do, you just might. The memory and thinking lapses people notice in themselves could be early markers of risk for Alzheimer’s disease, says experts, adding that perhaps there's hope in that because doctors might be a...

I stopped taking fish oil -- and all other vitamins -- a couple of months ago, after hearing no one knows what goes into them, as they're not regulated.  But maybe I stopped too soon.  A new study has found that fish oil can help preserve brain cells.  And I've been missing some for some time. People with higher levels of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil may also have larger brain volumes in old age equivalent to preserving one to two years of brain health,according to newswise.com.   Shrinking brain volume is a sign of Alzheimer’s disease as well as normal aging. But the goods news is that  “These higher levels of fatty acids can be achieved through diet and the use of supplements, and the results suggest that the effect on brain volume is the equivalent of delaying the normal loss of brain cells that comes with aging by one to two years,” said study author James V. Pottala, PhD, of the University of South Dakota in Sioux Falls and Health Diagnost...

If your son or daughter is thinking of going out for a contact sport, you -- and they -- might want to think again. Concussions have been in the news lately, mostly because, in the past, it was not known they could be responsible for depression, possibly Alzheimer's, even death. Today we know all that but a new study has found that "E ven in the absence of a concussion, blows to the head during a single season of football or ice hockey may affect the brain’s white matter and cognition, or memory and thinking abilities," according to newswise.com. “We found differences in the white matter of the brain in these college contact sport athletes compared to non-contact sport varsity athletes,” the Web site quotes study author Thomas W. McAllister, MD, of Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. “The degree of white matter change in the contact sport athletes was greater in those who performed more poorly than expected on tests of memory and learning, suggesti...

I took French in school and my son's now taking Spanish.  I remember only a little of it, and wish it was more, now that a new study has found that speaking two languages can ward off Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. According to newswise.com, "In the largest study on the topic to date, research shows that speaking a second language may delay the onset of three types of dementias." At least for a while. The study found that people who spoke two languages developed dementia four and a half years later than people who only spoke one language. “Speaking more than one language is thought to lead to better development of the areas of the brain that handle executive functions and attention tasks, which may help protect from the onset of dementia," the Web site quotes study author Suvarna Alladi, DM, with Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, India. The study took place in India among people with an average age of 66 with dementia. ...