September 07, 2016

Today's Top Alzheimer's News

USA2 SPOTLIGHT 

A September 6, 2016 The Wall Street Journal article on the “unfitted business of Alzheimer’s” featured UsAgainstAlzheimer’s board member Meryl Comer. According to the article, “Meryl Comer said her husband, a scientist who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, didn’t pay taxes for four years. It wasn’t that he deliberately ignored them. “It’s the disease that creeps over them. They lose control,” says Ms. Comer, co-founder of Women Against Alzheimer’s and author of “Slow Dancing with a Stranger,” a book about the couple’s 20-year battle with Alzheimer’s.” [behind paywall] 


MUST READS

A September 7, 2016 Kaiser Health News article highlighted a new study on the impact of dementia on communication between caregivers and individuals in hospice care. According to the article, “Hospice’s purpose, at least one of them, is to ease a dying patient’s pain at the end of life and improve the quality of that life. But what’s to be done when a dementia patient in her waning days can’t communicate her pain or help identify the cause? Or resists taking medications?…Families often describe a cancer patient’s last months as stressful but meaningful. That isn’t the case with dementia patients because the disease changes the patient’s personality and causes behavior issues, according to George Demiris, one of the study’s authors and a professor of biobehavioral nursing and health systems at the University of Washington’s School of Nursing. Caregivers who took part in the study said they worried that their loved ones were in pain, but unable to properly express it — and that possibility disturbed them, according to interviews with families taking care of dementia patients in their last stage of life.” Read the study here.

 

A September 6, 2016 Scientific American article reported that “The Federal Trade Commission will be sending out rebates to thousands of Lumosity customers misled by company ads.” According to the article, “Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is preparing to send out rebates to thousands of customers who may have been drawn to Lumosity by its misleading ads. The agency has verified 13,000 requests for refunds, which will be funded by $2 million from Lumosity, but has yet to disclose how much each customer will receive. The FTC has moved against other digital health tools, too. In May, the marketer of the LearningRx suite of brain-training games agreed to a $200,000 settlement for making false claims about what the games could do to improve conditions like ADHD and Alzheimer’s disease.”

 

A September 6, 2016 McGill Newsroom article reported that “McGill University will launch an ambitious effort to advance understanding of the human brain and ease the burden of neurological and mental-health disorders, thanks to an $84 million, seven-year grant announced today under the federal government's Canada First Excellence Research Fund (CFREF).”