Mice in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease had some of their brain abnormalities reversed and their declining mental function restored when they were given low doses of a rarely used cancer drug.
Read the full article in The Washington Post
There is hopeful news in the battle against Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia that gradually robs millions of older Americans of their memories and mental capacities and ultimately kills them. Scientists are beginning to close in on possible diagnostic tests and treatments for this incurable disease. And the Obama administration, carrying out a law enacted in 2010, has just issued a “draft framework” for an aggressive campaign to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease effectively by 2025.
Read the full article at The New York Times
Yasutake Tomata of the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine and his colleagues followed nearly 14,000 adults aged 65 or older for three years.
They found those who drank the most green tea were the least likely to develop “functional disability,” or problems with daily activities or basic needs, such as dressing or bathing.
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Once seen as a ticket to obscurity, the field of aging research is coming of age. This can be seen in the convergence of thinking demonstrated at the Jan. 31 Frontiers in Aging symposium at the Clark Center auditorium.
Virtually every symposium speaker voiced a common theme: Rather than focus narrowly on one or another of numerous aging-related diseases — from cancer to arthritis to Alzheimer’s — the best way to delay or prevent all those diseases is to slow the aging process.
Read the full article at Stanford School of Medicine
Alzheimer’s disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau.
Read the full article at The New York Times
Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain. It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.
Read the full article at The New York Times
In corrections systems nationwide, officials are grappling with decisions about geriatric units, hospices and medical parole as elderly inmates — with their high rates of illness and infirmity — make up an ever increasing share of the prison population.
Read the full article at Time
Kristy Bryner worries her 80-year-old mom might slip and fall when she picks up the newspaper, or that she’ll get in an accident when she drives to the grocery store. What if she has a medical emergency and no one’s there to help? What if, like her father, her mother slips into a fog of dementia?
Those questions would be hard enough if Bryner’s aging parent lived across town in Portland, Ore., but she is in Kent, Ohio. The stress of caregiving seems magnified by each of the more than 2,000 miles that separate them.
Read the full article at NPR
The percentage of people who work and people who want to work has increased markedly in both the 65-and-older and 75-and-older groups, says Sara Rix, senior adviser for the AARP Public Policy Institute. For 2011, the participation rate for 65 and older was 17.9% compared with 10.8% in 1985. For 75 and older, the rate jumped from 4.3% in 1990 to 7.5% in 2011.
Read the full article at USA Today
In mid-January, Bob DeMarco, 61, left his 96-year-old mother’s side for the first time in eight years to go to a conference about Alzheimer’s disease just a few hours from the home they share in Delray Beach, Fla. He made elaborate plans for his time away, arranging for his mother, Dotty, who has advanced Alzheimer’s, to stay with nearby friends; getting his first cellphone lest there be an emergency; and bit by bit, day after day, “reminding” her of his coming departure.
Read the full article at The New York Times