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

ADELE HORIN Of all the things Australians fear, cancer is number one and dementia is number two. For me the order is reversed. I’ve had cancer (radiation, chemotherapy, lumpectomy). I’ve seen people die of cancer. It’s not easy or pretty. But I’ve also seen people die slowly of dementia – whether Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia, it doesn’t matter. Dementia holds a particular horror because it robs people of their intellect, their personality, their memory, their speech, their essential self. Cancer sufferers, on the other hand, remain recognisably themselves through the experience,… Read More

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV and PROFESSOR HENRY BRODATY, CO-DIRECTORS, CHeBA There is a worldwide effort to identify risk and protective factors, establish biomarkers and develop novel treatments for mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia and geriatric depression. Over the last decade, our group has been a leading contributor to this effort. We established five longitudinal studies of cognitive ageing and dementia along multiple lines of investigation which include neuroepidemiology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, genetics/genomics, proteomics, stem cells, metabolomics and… Read More

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

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV, MD, PhD As a clinician, I regularly advise my patients with memory problems to keep mentally and socially active; “keep stimulating your brain” is the message. There could be a new twist to the notion of brain stimulation if some of the current research proves to be beneficial. The National Institute of Health in the United States recently funded a study of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of Alzheimer’s. DBS is not a new technique, and it is regularly used to treat Parkinson’s disease and some other movement disorders. It involves the placement of… Read More

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV MD, PHD I invite you to imagine a world without 'dementia'. It is not that I have found a cure for all so-called dementias, or discovered a strategy to prevent them in the future. I am referring to the term 'dementia' from Latin demens, (meaning without mind) which has done much disservice to patients and physicians for far too long [1]. Should it not follow 'neurosis' into classificatory oblivion? Most clinicians and researchers accept that neurocognitive disorders lie on a continuum, ranging from very mild impairment almost indistinguishable from normal ageing… Read More

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au It's official. Centenarians are the fastest growing demographic in Australia, which means that the likelihood of living to 100 and beyond is increasing exponentially. Today, females born in a Western country have a 40% chance of reaching 100. And the odds are increasing. Much of this is, of course, down to advances in medical science and its ability to keep our bodies functioning far longer than that of our predecessors.....but what about our brains? With an ageing population comes a myriad of implications, good and bad. Positively, we get to live… Read More