Yesterday the New York Times reported on a study commissioned by the National Football League. The findings were a big concern for NFL players.  It seems Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49! Read more here…..

Scientific American posted an interesting article that proposed to put a predictive time line on the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Read about it here.

Whether it’s decision making, judgment, basic math, memory loss  or other brain function, it is increasingly important to stimulate all these cognitive capabilities on a regular basis. One is rarely used in isolation. Cognitive cross training programs can help at the early stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease or in advance of cognitive decline.

The 5th annual Games for Health Conference was held in Boston.  It was co-sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, from whom HAPPYneuron was a proud award recipient last year. I presented about enabling better tools for professionally guided Cognitive Remediation programs. The slides can be found here…..

According to a new, long-term research study by neurological experts at the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center, both African-American and white older patients with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment have an increased risk of mortality.  Research results were published in the June 2009 issue of Archives of Neurology.

Alzheimer’s disease has emerged as a leading cause of death in the United States, and it substantially reduces life expectancy in those diagnosed with the disease. To date, there have been relatively few population-based studies of survival rates in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment.  Because these studies have primarily focused on the disease and its impact on white persons, little is known about survival rates in African Americans.

The results of the study conducted by Rush suggest that compared to people without cognitive impairment, risk of death was increased by about 50 percent among those with mild cognitive impairment and was nearly three-fold greater among those with Alzheimer’s disease. These effects were seen among African Americans and whites and did not differ by race. Read more about the study here….