December 12, 2014

Today's Top Alzheimer's News

A new documentary highlights new treatments for dementia patients, The Atlantic profiles the high-stakes world of searching for cures for diseases like Alzheimer's, and the latest advancements in Alzheimer's diagnostic tools (read more).

Must reads

  • A December 11, 2014 New York Times article highlighted a new dementia documentary called "“Do You Know What My Name Is?” According to the article, "The filmmakers are out to convince us that a treatment developed in Japan can help, with its focus on sessions for reading, writing and performing computational tasks. The therapy and its results, as reported here in scenes at the Eliza Jennings home in Cleveland, offer hope, but the film recording it all has only a little more appeal than a pleasantly narrated DVD to train employees of assisted-living facilities. At least it’s a peek inside life in such places." 
  • A December 10, 2014 The Atlantic article reported on the slow process of searching for cures for "high-stake" diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. According to the article, "There are some 7,000 known diseases in the world. Only about 500 have treatments, and even fewer have cures. There are viruses like Ebola, which are devastating and difficult to manage even though scientists understand perfectly well what causes them. There are ticking time bombs like cancer and Alzheimer's, the causes of which are just beginning to be understood. And there are scores of rare diseases, such as progeria—which science has largely ignored. Scientists are moving as fast as they can to close those gaps. Buoyed by unprecedented technological advances over the past two decades, today's researchers are not satisfied with simply treating symptoms. They want to find the root cause of each disease and fix it. They want cures."
  • A December 11, 2014 Bloomberg article reported on advancements in diagnostic tools for Alzheimer's. According to the article, "This year, research teams announced blood tests under development to diagnose Alzheimer’s before symptoms arise, including one that predicted the disease’s onset with 100 percent accuracy a decade in advance. While the tests will likely help drug companies evaluate medicines, they’ll also create wrenching personal and ethical dilemmas for patients who will have to live with the knowledge that they’re destined to develop the disease, the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the Alzheimer’s Association."