Like so much in chronic disease, Alzheimer’s is complicated: “once you have seen one person with Alzheimer’s, you have seen one person with Alzheimer’s. In other words, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a heterogeneous disease which may present and progress differently depending on the person and the factors contributing to the disease pathology. As such, there is no paint-by-numbers approach to targeted treatment. Researchers in the field are thus motivated to figure out a way to categorize AD in order to guide more individualized approaches to patient care and help anticipate disease trajectory.”
Cardiff University study is ‘major step forward’ in hunt for developmental origins of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.
Scientists from Cardiff University have discovered new links between the breakdown in brain cell development and the risk of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.
Genetic risk factors are known to disrupt brain development in a number of these disorders, but little is known about which aspects of this process are affected.
we individualize our conscious awareness through the filter of our nervous system, our “local” mind, our very inner subjectivity, but consciousness itself, the Self in a greater sense, our “core” self is universal, and knowing it through experience has been called enlightenment, illumination, awakening, or transcendence, through the ages.
Here’s Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind (2021), Part IV: UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS >
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All memory storage devices, from your brain to the RAM in your computer, store information by changing their physical qualities. Over 130 years ago, pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal first suggested that the brain stores information by rearranging the connections, or synapses, between neurons.
Since then, neuroscientists have attempted to understand the physical changes associated with memory formation. But visualizing and mapping synapses is challenging to do. For one, synapses are very small and tightly packed together. They’re roughly 10 billion times smaller than the smallest object a standard clinical MRI can visualize. Furthermore, there are approximately 1 billion synapses in the mouse brains researchers often use to study brain function, and they’re all the same opaque to translucent color as the tissue surrounding them.
In a scene straight out of a spy movie, an elderly couple reportedly escaped from an assisted living facility using some cunning military expertise—and an antiquated telecommunications method.
On March 2, 2020, a resident of a secure memory care unit in Elmcroft of Lebanon, a Tennessee nursing facility, “eloped” with his wife from the premises, according to a state report on the incident. (The Tennessean first reported the incident last month.) The man was admitted to Elmcroft with a diagnosis of dementia, while the woman was admitted with Alzheimer’s disease.
A stranger spotted the residents, who were safe, walking two blocks from Elmcroft about 30 minutes after they left and picked them up.
In a first, U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient.
Unusual opportunity
Last week’s procedure marks the first time that a pig organ has been transplanted into a human who has a chance to survive and recover. In 2021, surgeons at New York University Langone Health transplanted kidneys from the same line of genetically modified pigs into two legally dead people with no discernible brain function. The organs were not rejected, and functioned normally while the deceased recipients were sustained on ventilators.
Aside from that, most research has so far taken place in non-human primates. But researchers hope that the 7 January operation will further kick-start clinical xenotransplantation and help to push it through myriad ethical and regulatory issues.
An editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post wrote a screed attacking electric cars this week. His heavily slanted piece was filled with misinformation. Here’s the truth about driving an electric car in winter.
Last week, hundreds of motorists on I-95 in Virginia were stuck for hours when a blizzard closed the highway south of Washington, DC. Highway crews couldn’t spread ice-melting chemicals before the storm arrived because the rain that preceded it would have washed them away. But when temperatures dropped, the rain quickly turned to ice. Then the snow came and made the ice treacherously slippery. Tractor trailers trying to get off the highway lost control, blocking many exit ramps. Senator Tim Kaine was trapped in the tangled mess of stalled cars for 27 hours.
Afterwards, Charles Lane, an editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a blistering opinion piece entitled, “Imagine Virginia’s Icy Traffic Catastrophe — But With Only Electric Vehicles.” In it, he wails about the Tesla driver who banged on the door of a tractor trailer, begging for help because he was afraid his family might freeze to death if his battery ran out of power. “If everyone had been driving electric vehicles, this mess could well have been worse,” Lane writes.
He goes on to say even Tesla warns on its website the cold temperatures can reduce range. Charging a cold battery takes longer, and besides, he says, there aren’t that many charging stations anyway. And what happens if the power goes out? What then? Lane, a graduate of Yale law school, apparently lacks the mental capacity to realize that when the power goes out, gas pumps stop working as well.
Even in people with signs of Alzheimer’s and other dementia, a new study found exercise boosted proteins in the brain that may prevent cognitive decline.
