Some say I’m a broken record when it comes to preaching the health benefits of getting outside for a daily walk. Regular exercise is one of the pillars of optimum health, but, until now, I didn't realize how vital the "outside" part of my walk is for protecting my memory against decline. When I looked [...]
Someone just gave you a phone number to remember, and you don’t have a pen with you. What do you do? We all have to remember a thousand different things from passwords to how to navigate our smart phones, but it’s not easy in an age of information overload. We’ve got too many distractions. Luckily, [...]
For more than a decade now researchers have tried to “cure” Alzheimer’s disease by clearing away beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins with drugs. But, as we’ve reported repeatedly in this newsletter, clinical trials on these drug therapies have shown that eliminating the proteins does nothing to improve Alzheimer’s-related memory loss. Now, researchers point to [...]
Scientists have focused on amyloid beta plaques as the primary cause of Alzheimer’s disease for more than 25 years. Readers of this publication know I tossed the theory out a long time ago. For one thing, autopsies reveal that quite a few people who died with dementia don’t have the plaques. In addition, a great [...]
Scientists are a mostly conservative bunch, shunning anything theatrical. But Professor Giovanna Mallucci made an exception on a cold October morning when she stood in front of an audience of swimmers and shivering BBC reporters at an unheated, open air pool in London. She chose this particular venue for a good reason. It was to [...]
For years, a few brain researchers have been looking into a non-invasive method to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms begin. They’re focused on the only part of the brain that’s visible without using complicated imaging techniques like X-rays or drilling open the skull. They’re looking at the retina, located at the back of the eye. [...]
If you want to boost your ability to learn new things and remember important information, studies show there’s one quick and easy way to do that. Researchers have found that if we take notes by hand, writing them out the old fashioned way, we can learn more effectively than when we tap our notes into [...]
All of us have experienced foggy thinking from a bad night’s sleep. But for some, chronic poor sleep can be a brain health disaster. What’s more, neuroscientists recently confirmed that millions of poor sleepers suffer from a common and often undiagnosed condition that dramatically increases your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. I’m talking about sleep apnea. [...]
Researchers have been working on blood tests, eye tests, even sense of smell tests-- all in an attempt to uncover a screening tool that reveals the very earliest signs of dementia, long before symptoms appear. As they search for what some have called the holy grail of neuroscience, a group of dementia researchers in Boston [...]
More than a quarter of Americans have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, and over two-thirds struggle with sleep at least once a week. For these people, listening to white noise can help. However, a different device has arrived on the scene that may be even more effective than white noise devices. Not only does [...]
