A new study involving 96 older adults initially free of dementia at the time of enrollment, of whom 12 subsequently developed mild Alzheimer’s, has clarified three fundamental issues about Alzheimer's: where it starts, why it starts there, and how it spreads.
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A gene linked to Alzheimer's has been linked to brain changes in childhood. This gene, SORL1, has two connections to Alzheimer’s: it carries the code for the sortilin-like receptor, which is involved in recycling some molecules before they develop into amyloid-beta; it is also involved in lipid metabolism, putting it at the heart of the vascular risk pathway.
A study that followed 800 Swedish middle-aged women from 1968 to 2005 has found that high levels of stress in middle age increased Alzheimer’s risk by 21% and risk of any dementia by 15%.
Of the 800 women, 425 died during the course of the study while 153 (19%) developed dementia (of whom 104 developed Alzheimer’s), at an average age of 78. The number of stressors and long-standing distress were independently associated with Alzheimer’s.
A small study using an artificial language adds to evidence that new vocabulary is learned more easily when the learner uses gestures.
“Vimmish”, the artificial language used in the study, follows similar phonetic rules to Italian. The German-speaking participants were given abstract and concrete nouns to learn over the course of a week. In the first experiment, the 21 subjects heard the words and their translations under one of three conditions:
A study involving 266 people with mild cognitive impairment (aged 70+) has found that B vitamins are more effective in slowing cognitive decline when people have higher omega 3 levels.
Participants were randomly selected to receive either a B-vitamin supplement (folic acid, vitamins B6 and B12) or a placebo pill for two years. The vitamins had little to no effect for those with low levels of omega-3 fatty acids, but were very effective for those with high baseline omega-3 levels.
A new MRI technique has revealed that it is the structural integrity of the hippocampus more than its size that reflects fitness and correlates with cognitive performance.
A pilot study involving 22 breast cancer patients currently receiving chemotherapy (mean age 54), has found that those with higher levels of inflammatory biomarkers did significantly worse on tests for short-term visual memory. One particular biomarker — tumor necrosis factor-alpha (as reflected through its two soluble receptors, TNFRI and TNFRII) — was the strongest indicator of cognitive problems.
Link found between chronic inflammation and Alzheimer's gene risk
Data from the Framingham Heart Study has found carriers of the ApoE4 gene were much more likely to develop Alzheimer’s if they also had chronic low-grade inflammation. Indeed, the researchers suggest that, in the absence of inflammation, there might be no difference of Alzheimer's risk between ApoE4 and non-ApoE4 carriers.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/buso-lfb101818.php
Data from over 5,000 individuals found that a measure of belly fat (waist:hip ratio) was associated with reduced cognitive function in older Irish adults (60+). Body mass index (BMI), however, was found to protect cognitive function.
BMI is a crude measure of body fat and cannot differentiate between fat and muscle — the muscle component is likely to be the protective factor.
A study looking at how 51 women performed on a test of their attention after they ate either a meal high in saturated fat or the same meal made with sunflower oil (high in unsaturated fat), found their performance was worse after eating the high-saturated-fat meal than after they ate the meal containing a healthier fat.
This is particularly remarkable when you consider that both meals with high in fat, being designed to resemble fast-food meals that you might get at McDonald’s or Burger King. So this is showing that even this slight improvement can have a noticeable effect.