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NEWS

• Early diagnosis lets patients look Alzheimer's square in the face...
• "Our data strongly suggest that genetic factors make a substantial contribution to autism, but that does not mean that the entire cause of autism is genetic. Together with many other studies, our study argues that genetic factors play a very important role in autism, while leaving open a role for other, environmental factors..."
• "Unidentified traumatic brain injury is an unrecognized major source of social and vocational failure."
• Meningitis is far more common in children than is encephalitis.
• Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia in the elderly, representing 60 percent of all dementias in those over 65.
• The Epilepsy Therapy Project will provide almost US$300,000 over the next two years to a group of researchers from leading Australian institutions including the University of Newcastle.
• Headache is the seventh leading reason for outpatient physician visits in the United States.
• Severe septicaemia including meningococcal septicaemia - the blood poisoning form of meningitis - is a major cause of death and disability in children.
• Initial hopes for improved narcolepsy medicines that replace hypocretin have faded, because studies showed that the molecule did not readily cross the blood-brain barrier.
• Michael J. Fox Foundation Awards $2.4 Million For Validation Of Nine Promising Therapeutic Targets For Parkinson's Disease.
• A long-term study provides important clues that may help doctors predict the clinical course of some individuals’ multiple sclerosis.
• "We found that we could pick up seizure activity in most of the patients using aEEG monitors that included the raw signals."
• Chemotherapy, while effective at treating tumors, often harms healthy cells as well, leading to severe side effects especially in young children.

Alzheimer Disease

It is the most common cause of dementia, which is an acquired cognitive and behavioral impairment of sufficient severity to interfere significantly with social and occupational functioning. At present, the disorder afflicts approximately 5 million people in the United States and more than 30 million people worldwide. A larger number of individuals have lesser levels of cognitive impairment, which frequently evolve into a full-blown dementia, thereby increasing the number of affected persons. Prevalence of this disorder is expected to increase substantially in this century, since the disorder preferentially affects the elderly, who constitute the fastest growing age bracket in many countries, especially in industrialized nations. For example, statistical projections indicate that the number of persons affected by the disorder in the United States will nearly triple by the year 2050.

AD most commonly presents with insidiously progressive memory loss, to which other spheres of cognitive impairment are added over the course of several years. Functions commonly affected after the development of memory loss include language disorders (e.g., anomia, progressive aphasia) and impaired visuospatial skills and executive functions. Substantially rarer presentations include right parietal lobe syndrome, progressive aphasia, spastic paraparesis, and impaired visuospatial skills, subsumed under the so-called visual variant of AD. These latter, unusual presentations often present a diagnostic challenge, since they are not covered under the guidelines for the clinical diagnosis of the disease. Therefore, their diagnosis necessitates histopathologic confirmation or is made at the time of autopsy, disconfirming previous diagnoses (e.g., primary progressive aphasia, cerebrovascular conditions, prion disorders) made on purely clinical grounds.