A Finnish study involving moderately obese adult patients with mild obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) has found that even a modest weight loss (5%) can improve OSA, if occurring in the early stages of OSA.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/uoef-emw021114.php
Cognitive testing for dementia has a problem in that low scores on some tests may simply reflect a person's weakness in some cognitive areas, or the presence of a relatively benign form of mild cognitive impairment (one that is not going to progress to dementia). A 2008 study found that one of every six healthy adults scored poorly on two or more of 10 tests in a brief cognitive battery. Following this up, the same researchers now show that a more holistic view might separate those who are on the path to dementia from those who are not.
In 2013 I reported briefly on a pilot study showing that “super-agers” — those over 80 years old who have the brains and cognitive powers more typical of people decades younger — had an unusually large anterior cingulate cortex, with four times as many von Economo neurons.
A six-month pilot study involving 101 healthy older adults (65+), who were randomly put into one of three exercise interventions or a no-change control, has found that the exercise groups all showed significant improvement in visual-spatial processing and attention, with more improvement in visual-spatial processing occurring in those with higher levels of exercise.
An online national survey of 2,012 adult Americans (of whom 948 were parents) has found that, while the vast majority (87%) don’t know the definition of a concussion and many don’t know the injury is treatable, there is a high level of concern and even fear across the country.
Our bodies’ ability to regulate its temperature gets worse with age, along with a slowing metabolism. We also become more vulnerable to Alzheimer's as we age. A study compared mice genetically engineered to manifest Alzheimer's symptoms as they age with normal mice. They found that these transgenic mice were worse at maintaining their body temperature as they aged, with the difference reaching almost 1° Celsius by the age of 12 months.
A large study using data from the famous Framingham Heart Study has compared changes in dementia onset over the last three decades. The study found that over time the age of onset has increased while the length of time spent with dementia has decreased.
Poor sleep has been associated with the development of Alzheimer's disease, and this has been thought to be in part because the protein amyloid beta increases with sleep deprivation. A new study explains more.
Experiments with mice show that sleep deprivation also rapidly increases levels of the other key Alzheimer’s disease protein, tau tangles.
The work built on findings that tau is high in older people who sleep poorly, and that, when people are kept awake all night, their tau levels rise by about 50%.
Data from 28,485 older Canadians (45+) found that those with chronic insomnia performed significantly worse on cognitive tests than those who had symptoms of insomnia without any noticable impact on their daytime functioning and those with normal sleep quality. The main type of memory affected was declarative memory (memory of concepts, events and facts).
Data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, in which nearly 4,000 older adults (60+) had their walking speed assessed on two occasions in 2002-2003 and in 2004-2005, those with a slower walking speed were more likely to develop dementia in the next 10 years. Those who experienced a faster decline in walking speed over the two-year period were also more likely to develop dementia.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/ags-oaw032318.php