Blog: The Brain Dialogues, filtered by tag: Dementia Research

3 Nov 2016

Research Check: Can Drinking Coffee Reduce Your Dementia Risk?

PROFESSOR HENRY BRODATY MB, BS PROFESSOR CLARE COLLINS This article was originally published on 14 October 2016 in The Conversation. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is a growing problem worldwide. There are 350,000 people with dementia in Australia and this is set to rise to 900,000 by 2050. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. So if “coffee really can help to prevent dementia”, as a headline by the Daily Mail last week suggested, that would be amazing. This is why the study on which the headline was basedreceived so much interest. It was reported on by… Read More
19 Oct 2016

Everyone's Different: What Parts of the Brain Make Our Personalities So Unique?

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV, MD, PhD This article was originally published on 30 September 2016 in The Conversation.     The brain is key to our existence, but there’s a long way to go before neuroscience can truly capture its staggering capacity. For now though, our Brain Control series explores what we do know about the brain’s command of six central functions: language, mood, memory, vision, motor skills and personality and what happens when things go wrong. Personality is a broad term describing how people habitually relate to the world and their inner self. After the developmental… Read More
28 Jun 2016

Blood Test for Alzheimer’s: Close Or Hype?

This article was originally published in the The Conversation on 28 July 2016 Anyone who has ever visited a doctor’s office is familiar with the use of blood tests for the diagnosis of various diseases. Because blood comes in contact with all organs of the body, it carries markers of the health of these organs. It is an easily accessible body fluid, can be drawn repeatedly to follow the progress of a disease and, in most cases, blood tests are relatively inexpensive. It is therefore not surprising news that a possible blood test for dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease, gets much… Read More
17 Dec 2015

Standardised Approach Needed to Validate miRNAs Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au Failure to use a standardised approach is limiting the effectiveness of research into whether microRNAs (miRNAs) can be used as a blood biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease.  Researchers at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) at UNSW Australia conducted a systematic review investigating research into miRNAs as potential biomarkers for early diagnosis and found that few studies assessed the same miRNAs and where they did, methodological differences between the studies made it hard to validate findings. The research, led by CHeBA PhD student Dr… Read More
25 Feb 2015

Keeping Fit to Delay Dementia

MONICA CATIONS By now it is well established that poor cardiovascular and cognitive health in early life can increase the risk of dementia in old age.  But did you know that it could also bring forward the age of dementia onset to midlife?  Evidence is emerging to suggest that fitness as early as the teenage years could be associated with younger onset dementia (YOD). Younger onset dementia is any dementia with onset before the age of 65 years.  It is much less common than dementia in old age, but there are currently around 20 000 people with YOD living in Australia.  Dementia in midlife… Read More
22 Sep 2014

The Role of Epigenetics in Cognitive Ageing

DR KAREN MATHER As we age, there is a decline in cognitive performance but there is great variability in the rate and degree of cognitive ageing observed across older adults.  The domains of information processing speed, episodic memory (autobiographical memory) and executive function (decision making) are most affected.  However, the biological processes driving this age-related cognitive decline are unclear.  A greater understanding of the causes and correlates of cognitive ageing would assist in identifying individuals at risk of cognitive decline and suggest interventions that may… Read More
4 Aug 2014

Raising Researchers

KATE CROSBIE What makes a good researcher? Perseverance, creativity and problem solving all come to mind, but what about time and support? In 2008, CHeBA won an NHMRC Capacity Building Grant for the prevention and management of mental disorders in older Australians, funded to run from 2009 until 2015. One aim of this funding was to provide promising researchers with a sufficient period of training and apprenticeship to help them emerge as independent leaders in their respective fields. But is “capacity building” just another meaningless buzzword? With no definitive understanding of the… Read More
10 Oct 2013

Is the Incidence of Dementia Declining?

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV, MD, PhD It’s rare to hear good news about dementia, so two recent reports showing it may be becoming less common created a fair amount of excitement.  Not a week goes by without some new promised therapy for dementia having failed in a clinical trial. The joke in dementia circles is that “the cure for dementia is only five years away, but will always remain five years away”.  But things perked up considerably when the reports in the prestigious medical journal Lancet showed that dementia rates seem to be declining. Study on Prevalence The first report was from… Read More