We’re hav­ing a good con­ver­sa­tion among Sharp­Brains Sum­mit par­tic­i­pants, prompted by the blog post Life­long brain well­ness and performance–not med­ical disease–drives grow­ing demand for dig­i­tal brain health solu­tions. In what is a beau­ti­ful exam­ple of the need to see both the for­est and the trees Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. White­house will dis­cuss why and how we need to revamp Alzheimer’s Diag­no­sis, Pre­ven­tion and Care, at the upcom­ing 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th, 2012), build­ing on this quote he gave to an ABC News story 2 days ago:

“The field of Alzheimer’s research is get­ting a lit­tle dis­torted. There’s a con­stant need to focus on magic bul­lets and sin­gle mol­e­cules,” White­house told ABC News. “It really requires a pub­lic health focus. The most effec­tive inter­ven­tions are not going to be drugs.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Descrip­tion: “The report “Demen­tia: a pub­lic health pri­or­ity” has been jointly devel­oped by WHO and Alzheimer’s Dis­ease Inter­na­tional. The pur­pose of this report is to raise aware­ness of demen­tia as a pub­lic health pri­or­ity, to artic­u­late a pub­lic health approach and to advo­cate for action at inter­na­tional and national levels.

Demen­tia is a syn­drome that affects mem­ory, think­ing, behav­iour and abil­ity to per­form every­day activ­i­ties. The num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing with demen­tia world­wide is cur­rently esti­mated at Read the rest of this entry »

Below you can find the full tran­script of our engag­ing Q&A ses­sion yes­ter­day on holis­tic brain health with clin­i­cal neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist Dr. Paul Nuss­baum, author of Save Your Brain. You can learn more about the full Brain Fit­ness Q&A Series Here.

Per­haps one of the best exchanges was: 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 »

Stronger Effort Needed To Pre­vent Men­tal, Emo­tional, And Behav­ioral Dis­or­ders in Young peo­ple, Experts Urge (Sci­ence Daily)

- “The fed­eral gov­ern­ment should make pre­vent­ing men­tal, emo­tional, and behav­ioral dis­or­ders and pro­mot­ing men­tal health in young peo­ple a national pri­or­ity, says a new report from the National Research Coun­cil and Insti­tute of Medicine.”

- “Research has shown that a num­ber of pro­grams are effec­tive at pre­vent­ing these prob­lems and pro­mot­ing men­tal health, the report says. Such pro­grams could be imple­mented more broadly, but cur­rently there is no clear fed­eral pres­ence to lead these efforts.  The White House should cre­ate an entity that can coor­di­nate agency ini­tia­tives in this area, set pub­lic goals for pre­ven­tion, and pro­vide needed research and fund­ing to achieve them, said the com­mit­tee that wrote the report.”

- “There is a sub­stan­tial gap between what is known about pre­vent­ing men­tal, emo­tional, and behav­ioral dis­or­ders and what is actu­ally being done,” said Ken­neth E. Warner, com­mit­tee chair and dean of the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan School of Pub­lic Health.”

Spec­tac­u­lar arti­cle by Dr. Denise Park in this month’s Cere­brum:

Work­ing Later in Life May Facil­i­tate Neural Health

- “Carmi Schooler at the National Insti­tutes of Health, using a tech­nique that allowed him to assess causal rela­tion­ships, found that adults who per­formed intel­lec­tu­ally chal­leng­ing jobs across their life span showed more cog­ni­tive flex­i­bil­ity in late adult­hood than those who per­formed less demand­ing jobs.“
– “Per­haps the most com­pelling evi­dence regard­ing the impact of novel expe­ri­ences on brain vol­ume and func­tion comes from a study at the Max Planck Insti­tute in Ger­many. Adults with a mean age of 59 spent three months learn­ing to jug­gle three balls. Although only about half the par­tic­i­pants were able to achieve com­pe­tence in this com­plex skill, those who suc­ceeded had increased vol­ume in a mediotem­po­ral area of the visual cor­tex as well as the nucleus accum­bens and the hip­pocam­pus, sug­gest­ing that sus­tained novel expe­ri­ence can increase the sizes of neural struc­tures. Notably, the changes in the nucleus accum­bens and hip­pocam­pus were Read the rest of this entry »