Elder Care & Elder Rage: Know the Warning Signs of Alzheimer's!

News Blaze
By Jacqueline Marcell
For eleven years I pleaded with my elderly father to allow a caregiver to help him with my ailing mother, but after 55 years of loving each other - he adamantly insisted on taking care of her himself. Every caregiver I hired to help him sighed in exasperation, "Jacqueline, I just can't work with your father-his temper is impossible to handle. I don't think you'll be able to get him to accept help until he's on his knees himself."

My father had always been 90% great, but boy-oh-boy that bad temper was a doozy. He'd never turned it on me before, but then again - I'd never gone against his wishes either. When my mother nearly died...read the whole story

Newsweek writer discuss dementia:My Mother’s Case of ‘Pleasant Dementia’

By Sara Davidson | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 13, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Sep 22, 2008
She lost her memory but gained a kind of inner peace. And after years of worry and fear, so did I.
My mother, Alice, had always been strong-willed, opinionated and demanding, a fiery real-estate agent who was a life master in bridge and a maven of musical theater. She'd told my sister, Terry, and me never to put her in a care facility. But at 93, she had advancing dementia and was living in L.A., 1,200 miles from my home in Colorado and twice that distance from Terry's in Hawaii. For years we'd put off moving her, fearing she would yell and berate us for disobeying her wishes. I trembled when the day finally came to transport Alice to a home for the memory-impaired. What I hadn't reckoned on was the radical personality change that accompanied her dementia—a condition, I learned later, known as "pleasantly demented."

It had not been pleasant, though, when Alice, in her late 80s, started forgetting the.....read the whole story

Mysteries of Memory

New research explores how the brain records and then recalls events.
By Jeneen Interlandi | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 13, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Sep 22, 2008

It's no trivial matter. One of the most devastating effects of dementia and Alzheimer's disease (expected to afflict 14 million Americans by 2040) is the loss of what's known as episodic memory—the capacity to remember experiences in detail. Despite years of research and some initial progress, the ability to restore this function to aging or diseased brains continues to elude doctors. But research published earlier this month in the journal Science has provided some important clues into how the brain builds memories......read the whole article

Pharmacist Selects Healthy Tips

By Luanne Austin

David Mattichak draws on 40 years of experience as a pharmacist to read and select the best tips from medical studies in his new book, "Please Help Me Stay Healthy.

PORT REPUBLIC - Did you know that eating raw honey made by bees from local plants (and therefore, local pollen) can help prevent allergies?

Did you know that, in addition to protecting your heart, taking aspirin can help prevent colon cancer?

Did you know that drinking one cup of coffee gives you the antioxidant power of three oranges?

Those are just a few of the tips David Mattichak offers in his book, "Please Help Me Stay Healthy."

For the book, he draws on his education and experience as a research pharmacist and then 40 years as a drugstore pharmacist. He also reads a number of medical studies.

"Most people don't have time to do all this research," says Mattichak, 80.

All of Mattichak's seven brothers died of heart attacks. He didn't want that to happen to him, so he started paying attention to his heart a long time ago.

As a pharmacist in the store, customers often talked to him about their health. Many people with high cholesterol never had a heart attack, while others with low cholesterol had suffered heart attacks. So he realized cholesterol was only part of the picture when it came to heart health.

Mattichak also discovered that blood cholesterol tests can vary widely from......read the whole story and a comment

Findings on Alzheimers and other dementias by Israeli researchers

Israeli21c
By Karin Kloosterman
September 04, 2008

Are you the type of guy who sulks in the office after you've had a blowout with your wife, or are you the one who easily sloughs off family troubles and lets the good times roll? According to Israeli researchers, your reaction to conflict in both the work and home environment -- with your spouse, peers and superior at work -- may determine your risk for Alzheimers and other dementias.

The Israeli research was recently revealed at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Chicago, and joined a number of insightful research projects on dementia and Alzheimer's around the world......Read the whole article

Any new studies, like this recent Israeli

Alzheimers in the news, top killer in Florida

Linda Shrieves | Sentinel Staff Writer
September 2, 2008
Exercise and diet -- key to prevention?
Alzheimer's disease robs people of their personality, of their brain and their abilities. It can be devastating not just to the patient, but to their families.

So is there anything you can do to prevent it?

Maybe, say doctors.

Exercise your body. Physical exercise is probably the closest thing we have to a cure, says Dr. Glen Finney, a neurologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Cardiovascular exercise, or exercise that's good for your heart
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Q&A about Alzheimers

New Approach Can Better Predict Alzheimers and Other Dementias

By : ANI
The accuracy of the prediction of Alzheimers and other dementias among older adults can be improved by measuring how much a person's performance varies across several neuropsychological tests, according to a study.

Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University say that developing strategies to improve the prediction and diagnosis of dementia has critical therapeutic and public health implications.
"Typically, when neuropsychological tests are used for diagnostic purposes, an individual's level of performance on specific tests is measured against healthy individuals to determine cognitive impairment," says Dr. Roee Holtzer, assistant professor of neurology and psychology at Einstein and lead author of the study.

"However, this approach does not take into account intra-individual variability in cognitive function," he adds.....

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