Men­tal exer­cises may pre­vent men­tal decline in seniors (CBC News):  “A review released by the Cana­dian Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion Jour­nal on the pre­ven­tion of cog­ni­tive decline said that med­i­c­i­nal and non-medicinal prod­ucts, and phys­i­cal exer­cise did noth­ing to pre­vent the decline in healthy seniors, but men­tal exer­cises Read the rest of this entry »

Drugs for Early-Stage Alzheimer’s (good New York Times editorial):

“The Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion has pro­posed low­er­ing the bar for approv­ing drugs to treat peo­ple at the ear­li­est stages of Alzheimer’s dis­ease, before they have devel­oped any seri­ous impair­ment or overt demen­tia. The goal is com­mend­able — to find ways to pre­vent or slow the pro­gres­sion of this ter­ri­ble dis­ease before it can rob peo­ple of their men­tal capac­i­ties. But the pro­posal raises trou­bling ques­tions as to whether the agency would end up approv­ing drugs that pro­vide lit­tle or no clin­i­cal ben­e­fit yet Read the rest of this entry »

Accord­ing to a new posi­tion state­ment by the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Neu­rol­ogy (AAN), pre­scrib­ing cog­ni­tive enhance­ment, “attention-boosting,” drugs to healthy chil­dren is mis­guided and not jus­ti­fi­able. Inter­est­ingly, a 2009 posi­tion state­ment by AAN still in force today stated that doing so with adult “patients” is both legal and eth­i­cal (includ­ing the remark that “Neu­rol­o­gists who pre­scribe med­ica­tions for the off-label use of neu­roen­hance­ment are act­ing law­fully,” with­out really chal­leng­ing whether the drugs have been proven to be a) effec­tive and b) safe in that con­text). Read the rest of this entry »

Accord­ing to a new study, the pop­u­la­tion with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease in the US will triple by 2050: from 4.7 mil­lions in 2010 to 13.8 mil­lions. This empha­sizes the urgent need for more research to find pre­ven­tive mea­sures, and for more enlight­ened pub­lic health ini­tia­tives and indi­vid­ual lifestyles designed to decrease demen­tia risks and delay onset of symptoms.

Between 1993 and 2011, researchers fol­lowed more than 10,000 indi­vid­u­als 65 and older. Par­tic­i­pants were inter­viewed and assessed for demen­tia every three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Sum­mary of the report just issued by The Royal Soci­ety in the UK: “Although the impact of human enhance­ment tech­nolo­gies has been widely debated, until now they have not been con­sid­ered in terms of their impact upon the nature of work…the Acad­emy of Med­ical Sci­ences, British Acad­emy, Royal Acad­emy of Engi­neer­ing and Royal Soci­ety came together to Read the rest of this entry »

Video Game With Biofeed­back Teaches Chil­dren to Curb Their Anger (Sci­ence Daily):

“Chil­dren with seri­ous anger prob­lems can be helped by a sim­ple video game that hones their abil­ity to reg­u­late their emo­tions, finds a pilot study at Boston Children’s Hos­pi­tal. Results were pub­lished online Octo­ber 24 in the jour­nal Ado­les­cent Psy­chi­a­try Read the rest of this entry »

Very inter­est­ing new data rein­forc­ing two main themes we have been ana­lyz­ing for a while:
1) We bet­ter start pay­ing seri­ous atten­tion (and R&D dol­lars) to lifestyle-based and non-invasive cog­ni­tive and emo­tional health inter­ven­tions, which are mostly ignored in favor of inva­sive, drug-based options
2) Inter­ven­tions will need to be per­son­al­ized. The study below ana­lyzes data at the coun­try level, but the same logic applies to the indi­vid­ual level

Many fear Alzheimer’s, want to be tested: sur­vey (Reuters):

- “The tele­phone sur­vey of 2,678 adults aged 18 and older in the United States, France, Ger­many, Spain and Poland was con­ducted by researchers at the Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health and Read the rest of this entry »