There's so much Alzheimer's news this week that it doens't fit into one article so here's the rest.
Reuters has a story about a study, funded by The National Institutes of Health, that found 10 percent of people aged 71 and over have Alzheimer's disease which totals about 2.4 million Americans.
"Most studies have been limited to a small region of the country or a few cities within the country, and then have used the findings from local regions to project the estimates of dementia," Brenda Plassman of Duke University Medical Center, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. "Our study has examined people in all regions of the U.S. and then estimated the prevalence," Plassman added.
Another Yahoo article covered a study that found that well-educated people with Alzheimer's disease had a delayed onset of the illness but lost their memory faster
"An elderly person who starts to see memory loss might well deteriorate fairly rapidly, particularly if he or she has a high education or high IQ," Charles Hall, a professor of epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who led the study, said in a telephone interview."And this is important to clinicians to know so they can advise their patients that things might well get very bad very fast, whereas in a lot of other people the decline is relatively gradual over a long period of time," Hall added.
And one last one. Fox News is reporting that Omega-3 Fats may reduce Alzheimer's risk. Study author Dr. Pascale Barberger-Gateau found that people who did not have the "alzheimer" gene, apolipoprotein E$ (ApoE4) who ate fish at least once a week had a 35% lower risk for developing the disease. Those that ate omega-3 rich foods like canola, flaxseed and walnut oil reduced their risk by 60% and those that ate fruits and vegetables daily reduced their risk by 30%
“While we’ve identified dietary patterns associated with lowering a person’s risk of dementia or Alzheimer's, more research is needed to better understand the mechanisms of these nutrients involved in these apparently protective foods,” said Barberger-Gateau.
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