Alzheimer's Disease can be predicted by Brain Plaque

The presence of beta-amyloid plaque in brains can help predict who will develop and who has Alzheimer's disease. According to data of about 9,500 people, amyloid can appear 20 to 30 years before signs of dementia ApoE4 gene, which increases the risk of the disease, speeds up amyloid buildup. With the help from amyloid screening, it can identify people for trials of prescriptions to prevent the disease. The results from these trials were insufficient because most brains were already damaged from dementia or they do not have the disease. According to Dr. Samuel Gandy, an Alzheimer's researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital, amyloid screening can be expensive and isn't covered by insurance, but most "can feel fairly confident that amyloid is due to Alzheimer's." He also said that if there were any medications that prevent the disease, they must be safe since the findings of amyloid could appear as early as 30 years old. The researchers examined many studies analyzing how dementia is linked to amyloid, resulting in the findings that, according to Dr. Ossenkoppele, the ApoE4 gene had a bigger effect than some people expected. "Even when people had one copy of a rarer ApoE2 gene that protects against Alzheimer's, they were still at high risk of having amyloid if they had the ApoE4 gene.

I found this article very informative and interesting. My grandfather, who passed away about 10 years ago, had Alzheimer's disease and it is good to know now that there are people working in this field to find a cure or help prevent this disease. With people working hard, there can be a cure or prevention for every disease. 

When the Brain Remembers but the Patient Doesn’t

This article from Science Daily discusses how the unconscious brain is able to function without the availability of the conscious brain. In one case, a patient survived an accident with brain damage and face blindness. To test her unconscious brain, doctors showed her images of familiar faces, unknown faces, and celebrity faces. They included new celebrities, as well as those who were famous before the patient’s accident.

The patient was not able to recognize the famous faces, however, her brain responded to the celebrities from before her accident. Professor Pegna concludes, “implicit processing might continue to occur despite the presence of an apparent impairment in conscious processing.” As long as a person’s cerebral structures are in a certain order (regarding time), then he will be able to respond to visual stimuli.

I think it is amazing how a person’s memory—from the time of the accident and beyond—may be damaged, but the memories that were established prior to the accident are still in tact. We can see here that just because a person with brain damage may not outwardly communicate visual awareness to doctors does not mean the brain is unresponsive. Ultimately, we can learn how important physiological testing is to learning about the condition of the brain.

Photograph: http://www.molwick.com/en/brain/025-human-brain-structure.html