For the first time in 27 years, new criteria and guidelines for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease have been published by three expert workgroups spearheaded by the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). If you have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or have a loved one with the disease, you may be asking, what does this mean for me? In the short term, the new guidelines [...]
Dear Readers, In a recent post this month, I focused on a study from Korea that examined whether the cardiovascular risk factors had similar effects on dementia risk in the Korean population as compared to Western populations. In this blog post, I discuss the latest data from Korea that examines the association of APOE e4 and depression to incident (development of ) dementia in elderly Koreans. This study used data from the 10/66 International Dementia [...]
High-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) imaging studies have identified characteristic changes in brain structure — thinning of key cortical regions and reduced volume of structures such as the hippocampus — in persons with mild cognitive impairment, in individuals known to carry gene mutations that directly cause Alzheimer’s disease, and in diagnosed Alzheimer’s patients. The current study, published in the Annals of Neurology, involved 87 cognitively normal older individuals and 32 patients diagnosed with mild Alzheimer’s (matched [...]
