BrainBlog

From The New York Times : Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s By DENISE GRADY The New York Times Published: October 24, 2006 When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen , an American artist in London, responded in characteristic fashion. “From that moment on, he began to try to understand it by painting himself,” said his wife, Patricia Utermohlen, a professor of art history. Mr. Utermohlen’s self-portraits are being exhibited through Friday at the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan, by the Alzheimer’s Association. The paintings starkly reveal the artist’s descent into dementia, as his world began to tilt, perspectives flattened and details melted away. His wife and his doctors said he seemed aware at times that technical flaws had crept into his work, but he could not figure out how to correct them. “The spatial sense kept slipping, and I think he knew,” Professor Utermohlen said. A psychoanalyst wrote that ...

From the FDA last week: FDA Approves Expanded Use of Treatment for Patients With Severe Alzheimer's Disease FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE P06-168 October 13, 2006 Media Inquiries: Susan Cruzan, 301-827-6242 Consumer Inquiries: 888-INFO-FDA The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved Aricept (donepezil hydrochloride) for the treatment of severe dementia in patients with Alzheimer's Disease. Aricept was previously approved for the treatment of mild to moderate dementia of the Alzheimer's type.  It now becomes the first product approved for the treatment of all degrees of severity of the disease.  "Alzheimer's Disease is a devastating, age-associated brain disorder that affects an estimated 4.5 million Americans -- and, as our population grows older, this number is expected to multiply," said Dr. Steven Galson, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "Today's approval makes available another trea...

In the past two years there have been quite a number of fictional works dealing with the brain and its disorders. I just found a new entry to that niche area of fiction in one of my neighborhood bookstores this afternoon: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (FSG Press). The condition, Capgras. The dedication page, a quote by Luria. Powers has done some remarkable fiction with the intertwine of Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations and DNA in the massive The Gold Bug Variations and with medical science, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality in other works.

From an NIH press release from 18 October 2006:  New Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials To Be Undertaken by NIA Nationwide Consortium The Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS), a federally-established consortium conducting clinical trials on Alzheimer’s disease (AD), will receive $52 million over six years to conduct several new trials, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today. The award is a cooperative agreement between the NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), which coordinates the consortium of nearly 70 sites in the United States and Canada. The purpose of the award is to test drugs for their effectiveness in slowing down the progression or treating the symptoms of AD, as well as to investigate new methods for conducting dementia research. ...

From the Science website: Asleep at the Memory Wheel By Greg Miller ScienceNOW Daily News 18 October 2006 ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding brain region slacking off in college students the day after they've pulled an all-nighter. The study is one of the first to investigate how sleep deprivation interferes with memory mechanisms in the human brain. Neuroscientist Matthew Walker of Harvard University and his colleagues paid 10 undergraduate students to forgo a night's sleep. The next day, the students viewed a series of 30 words, and two days later--after having two nights to catch up on their sleep--the students returned to the lab and took a test to see how well they remembered the words they'd seen. The students recalled about 40% fewer words overall than a group of 10 students who had slept normally, Walker reported here yester...