Posted on 09/19/2013 3:07:12 PM PDT by BenLurkin
PET imaging may have the capacity not only to diagnose the disease in a living person, but also to track its progression. Many diagnostic methods have targeted amyloid-beta, and with good reason, since this form of “brain gunk,” or plaques, is a key element in the disease. But this new research tags a protein called tau, which forms the well-known “tangles” in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and other forms of dementia and neurodegenerative disease. The researchers feel that using PET scans to visualize what’s going on in the brain may be a complement to amyloid-beta imaging, and one day help diagnose the disease very early on – before symptoms even occur.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Now my family can live with me in torment for an even LONGER time.
Test John McCain first!
I wonder if the smell test for Alzheimer’s would give a clue before this scan?
One of the first parts of the brain that’s affected by Alzeimer’s disease is the area that’s responsible for your sense of smell. If you cannot identify all the items on the list below by their smell, and have no other known condition, you should speak to your doctor.
Have a friend or partner test you with the items below:
Rose
Cherry
Smoke
Peppermint
Leather
Lilac
Pineapple
Soap
Strawberry
Natural Gas
Lemon
Clove
Interesting!
Except for research purposes, what does it do but give people more stress and anxiety about their future. We need to hope and pray for cures.
All I can think of is Tim McGraw’s “Live like you were dying”.
/8^o
That’s Great having new diagnostic capability to detect Alzheimer’s disease but with the advent of Obamacare by the time you need those diagnostic procedures the government will disallow it for people over a certain age since it will be considered not worthwhile.
The elderly during that era are going to pay a big price with their lives.There is NO way the Government is going to pay to keep the non-productive elderly alive when there will be young people in need of health care.
Just look at the British National Health System.You will see our country’s health system in the making.
Or worse...will rule out life prolonging treatments and procedures for people who test positive.
News Flash to Earthlings
Cognitive impairment and working memory deficits are among the visible signs of a an accelerated aging process mediated by the retention of excess intracellular lipofuscin bound iron in the neurons of the brain (most importantly in the hippo campus). We can already detect the impaired working memory in eight month old babies of diabetic mothers.
Scent is virtually the primary memory, probably because that is how animals, many of which are born blind, initially identified their parents and food-givers. It is still, I have heard, the most evocative sense (look at Proust!). I find that myself. Sometimes the scent of something, ranging from a flower or perfume to the smell of a particular environment, will trigger all sorts of apparently but not really unrelated memories.
Taste and smell are closely related. You can’t taste if you can’t smell, but you can smell if you can’t taste, because often the taste buds of older people give out long before their sense of smell.
One really staggering bit of trivia I got the other day is that people actually have four nostrils. The other two are in back, and feed odors to where they are smelled.
“Like other tetrapods, humans have two external nostrils and two additional nostrils inside the head. These internal nostrils are called “choanae” and each contains approximately 1000 strands of nasal hair. They also connect the nose to the throat, aiding in respiration.”
Wine tasters can’t really fully interpret wine until they have inhaled its odors through the back nostrils.
The sense of smell is also known to have our oldest memories, even half a century later, a memory may come back because of a unique smell.
(I used this idea to make a unique gift to a young girl, a box full of pleasant odors, each in their own vial, associated with a different part of the world. 50 different odors to smell and associate when young, so for the rest of her life, when she smelled one, it might remind her of that gift.)
Technical spoiler. Natural gas - methane, CH4 is odorless.
What you smell when you have a gas line leak is an added odorant, tert butylthiol.
I’ll slip on back to the lab now.
Remarkable! And how can anybody say man is a random product of chance collisions of elements?
Certainly, but tert-Butylthiol is a little hard to get at the hardware store, compared to ordinary natural gas with it added.
It would seem to make a lot of sense for somebody to make a Alzheimer’s scratch-and-sniff card. Add 4 ‘nul’ scratch and sniffs as well, so it can be a 4x4 card.
The trouble is that there are a lot of people with other reasons for a defective sense of smell. The test wouldn’t work for them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.