Diabetes Drug: Another New Hope for Alzheimer’s?

I often worry about the time I spend on the computer researching and writing this blog. But I just joined my housemates in the rec room, intending to ride my exercise bike and watch TV with them. My housemates were watching one of the endless "amateur hour" talent shows. This one was called The Voice. I had wanted to ride the bike for about 15 minutes, but I had to leave after just five minutes. What mind-numbing crap!

Dementia is another chronic worry. If I am headed in that direction, I'd surely speed up the process if I spent my evenings watching shows like that.

I find internet research on health topics fascinating and mentally stimulating. Maybe it also helps slow down any drift toward dementia. In any event, it's a more enjoyable way to spend an evening. Even with a good TV show, I tend to doze off after 9 pm, which makes it more difficult to sleep later. But the interactive demands of internet research keep me alert for hours.

So many new breakthroughs are happening in medical research! New studies involving the brain are especially fascinating, particularly for someone with Parkinson's, a disease that has certainly been reducing dopamine-generating cells in my brain for years. New findings establish two principles. First, the adult brain continues to grow and develop throughout our lives. Second, brain development in adulthood is shaped mostly by external stimuli. These conclusions suggest we can conduct healthy "workouts" for our brains, just as we do for our bodies.

The exercise bike for my brain includes scanning the online Science Daily's Mind & Brain News. In its  September 14 edition,, I found a report on the promise of a new diabetes drug to treat Alzheimer’s.

Insulin and Brain Health

In this study on mice, scientists at the University of Ulster used an experimental drug called (Val8)GLP-1, which mimics the activity of the natural protein GLP-1 (glucagon-like polypetide-1). This protein helps regulate the body’s response to blood sugar – the reason it has been useful in treating type 2 diabetes.

We’ve known for a long time that type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s. Research has shown that insulin plays a role in memory formation. When amyloid structures attach to neurons, the neurotoxins cut off insulin receptors, eventually producing insulin resistance in the brain. Developing diabetes then creates denser amyloid accumulation, making neurons even more insulin resistant. It’s a vicious cycle, in which diabetes and memory impairment develop concurrently, from the same cause.

The University of Ulster study showed that (Val8)GLP-1:

• crossed the tricky blood-brain barrier without difficulty, 
• promoted growth of new cells in the brain’s hippocampus region, which plays a key role in consolidating memory, and 
• appeared to create no side effects at the doses tested. 

Said lead researcher Christian Hölscer:

We are really interested in the potential of diabetes drugs for protecting brain cells from damage and even promoting new brain cells to grow. This could have huge implications for diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, where brain cells are lost. It is very encouraging that the experimental drug we tested, (Val8)GLP-1, entered the brain and our work suggests that GLP-1 could be a really important target for boosting memory.

Of course, the reference to Parkinson’s is heartening to this PWP. Progress on one neurodegenerative condition, like AD, often carries implications for others, like PD.

Dr Simon Ridley, Head of Research at Alzheimer's Research UK offered the standard caveat: "We are pleased… that this experimental diabetes drug could also promote the growth of new brain cells. While we know losing brain cells is a key feature of Alzheimer's, there is a long way to go before we would know whether this drug could benefit people with the disease."

He added, "This research will help us understand the factors that keep nerve cells healthy, knowledge that could hold vital clues to tackling Alzheimer's.”

A Plethora of Alzheimer’s-Diabetes Links
Science Daily has regularly updated new developments in the growing connections between AD and PD. Here are just a few:

• April 17, 2009: Novel Mechanisms Might Causally Link Type-2 Diabetes To Alzheimer's Disease
• October 28, 2009: Does Diabetes Speed Up Memory Loss In Alzheimer's Disease?
• August 26, 2010: Insulin Resistance, Type 2 Diabetes May Be Linked to Plaques Associated With Alzheimer's Disease, Study Suggests
• October 13, 2010: Diabetes Gene Linked to Degeneration of Enzyme Involved in Alzheimer's Disease Onset and Progression

This was much more fun and interesting than watching The Voice!

K.I.S.S. ("Keep It Simple, Stupid"): Good Advice when Dealing with a Bad Lawn OR a Bad Back

Here's my backyard oasis today:

And here's the pathetic patch of lawn (?) that remains:

I've been struggling for years to make grass take hold here. It's a shady spot. The soil is poor and compacted. I tried a moss lawn for a couple years, but that didn't work. Then every spring and fall, I'd try seed starter, seed, fertilizing, aerating, watering... the works. Not much success. This fall, I planned to have it all dug up and reseeded, hoping that starting over might work.

Then Bill Eck, my Bartlett Tree Expert rep, suggested I contact Bill Patton, who runs Turf Center Lawns.  He stopped by last week and -- after looking at my miserable little patch of lawn -- made these recommendations:

• Get some hard fescue grass seed (best for shade) and spread it thinly so the seeds don't touch.
• Rake it in.
• Water thoroughly.

What I really liked was his "Do Not" list:

• Don't fertilize. (But he does recommend using fertilizer to get rid of moss.)
• Don't water except when seeding.
• Don't mow except when the grass gets very high.
• Don't mow in the hot weather. (Hooray!!)
• Don't bother aerating.

If I do the seeding now, I should repeat it in mid-October.

In the future, I should seed in:

• Early April
• Mid May
• Mid June
• Late August
• Mid September
• Mid October

That's it. I hate to think of the money I've spent over the years on fertilizers and other products sold to jump start a lawn. When I had big lawns, pushing a mower around every week or two during Washington summers wasn't much fun, either.

How much quieter the neighborhood would be in July and August if everyone followed Bill's advice not to mow in hot weather! Of course, the lawn care companies wouldn't be very happy.

K.I.S.S. and My Aching Back
During this morning's meditation hour, I was thinking about the back pain flareup I've been experiencing this week. I wondered if the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" slogan might also apply to dealing with the low back pain I've had for over a year.

That pain started when I fractured the L-1 vertebra in my car crash last August. My doc told me to expect the pain to persist until the vertebra healed, which would take about four months. The vertebra healed, but the pain persisted in exactly the same spot. Then my back doctor, after re-examining the X-rays, attributed the discomfort to osteoarthritis.

I signed up for physical therapy at the back doctor's satellite office, but didn't see any benefit. I saw the physical therapist who has worked miracles on other back problems I had in the past. The exercises helped my general back pain, but not the sharp pain coming from this new "hot spot."

Then I went to a doctor at the pain center at Sibley Hospital. He gave me steroid shots he said usually helped about 85 percent of people with osteoarthritis. They didn't help me. Then he injected pain-relief meds directly into the hot spot. That didn't work. Next up was a prescription pain-relief patch. Nope.

A wellness center opened in my neighborhood, and I decided to try acupuncture there. They also had an introductory offer for reiki. I did both for about a month. They were pleasant and relaxing, but the pain persisted.

Next was massage. Same result -- pleasant and relaxing, but that's all.

Finally, I've been seeing a chiropractor for the past few months. I felt some relief at first (or thought I did), but the pain remains. The increased pain this past week began the night after the chiropractor had been especially aggressive in shoving my neck around.

So, during this morning's meditation, it occurred to me that this back pain history seemed similar to my struggle with the back lawn. Maybe I should forget about all these fancy extras and get back to K.I.S.S. basics. I know from my blog-related medical research that for every ailment I check, the two top recommendations invariably are diet and exercise.

The most relief I've gotten  this past year has come from 1) taking the curcumin supplement I started this spring, and 2) using my meditation hour to just sit with the pain. Though I've tried lots of "alternative" tactics, I haven't used my exercise bike or simply "walked through the pain," my back doctor's recommendation from the start.

So, maybe it's time for K.I.S.S. here, too. Writers are often reminded that "less is more." Maybe that maxim applies to back pain therapy, too. Eat wisely and get back on the exercise bike. Lose some weight. Take more walks while this gorgeous fall weather lasts. And continue the work I've just started with a local rehab center's physical therapist to strengthen core muscles.

The trouble is -- this plan requires harder work than simply taking a pain pill, or getting an injection, or having a masseuse or chiropractor work on me.

The GI Bill: the Biggest-Ever Government Grant Program Transformed the Middle Class, the Economy, and Universities

With all the recent blathering about the role of the government in building a strong middle class, and about the 47 percent who are wards of the state, I'm surprised we've heard nothing about the biggest, most successful government aid program ever --the GI Bill. Enacted in 1944, that legislation provided assistance to returning WWII vets for college, businesses and home mortgages.

Suddenly, millions of servicemen were able to afford their own homes for the first time. As a result, residential construction jumped from 114,000 new homes in 1944 to 1.7 million in 1950.

Some 2.2 million vets attended college or graduate school, and 5.6 million prepared for vocations in auto mechanics, electrical wiring, and construction. They could attend any institution that admitted them, using benefits that covered even the costliest tuition and helped support spouses and children.

Before 1940, colleges were mostly for the privileged, but the GI Bill opened doors for rural people, offspring of first-generation immigrants, and veterans from working- and middle-class backgrounds. In so many cases, these vets were the first members of their families to attend college. This influx of vets transformed our colleges into the world-class institutions they are today.

Vocational training led to jobs with middle-class incomes and benefits. Millions took low-interest loans to start businesses.

Nearly three in ten veterans used low-interest mortgages to buy homes, farms or businesses. The economic impact was huge. In 1955, for example, the Veterans Administration backed close to a third of all housing starts.

Many famous people were helped by the GI Bill: Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens and Byron White; U.S. Senators Bob Dole, John Glenn, George Mitchell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan; entertainers Harry Belefonte, Johnny Cash, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Walter Matthau.

Four Historians Assess the GI Bill
I found a July 4, 2000, PBS NewsHour program -- "The GI Bill's Legacy" -- in which Jim Lehrer (who will host the first presidential debate in October) interviewed historians Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Haynes Johnson, and Michael Beschloss. Here is some of what they had to say:

Stephen Ambrose
The GI Bill was the best piece of legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress, and it made modern America. The educational establishment boomed and then boomed and then boomed. The suburbs, starting with Levittown and others, were paid by GI's borrowing money on their GI Bill at a very low interest rate. Thousands and thousands of small businesses were started in this country and are still there thanks to the loans from the GI Bill.

It transformed our country....

But the GI Bill was designed to help veterans, not to transform America. No one had that idea in mind. But I'll tell you: millions of GIs who never, never dreamed that they might be able to go to college suddenly had the opportunity, and these guys went, and they became -- there's not a teacher in the country who isn't aware of this -- the best students we've ever had. [I can attest to this since I went to college with them and was impressed with their hard work and dedication. -- John]

God, they worked so hard, and they -- all of them -- came back to America feeling, "I just wasted the best years of my life. I know how to man a machine gun; I know how to fire a mortar; but I can't make a living out of this."

And now they had college opened up to them, and these guys [became] the students that every teacher in this country would just kill to have.

The American educational establishment of today, which is the envy of the world, was made by the GI Bill, and those veterans who came back brought about this enormous expansion and jobs for professors and jobs for technicians and jobs in the laboratories and students going to school learning and then going out into the world and applying what they have learned -- the beginning of modern America.

These GIs made modern America, and they did it because the government had enough sense to say we're going to educate these guys... we're going to give these guys an opportunity and they could go to Harvard. They could go to Stanford. They could go to the University of Chicago. They could go, as Art Buchwald did, to the Sorbonne in Paris and get 50 bucks a month if they weren't married, 75 if they were. Later on that figure was moved up, and they could study and work and improve themselves and the institutions that served them.

Doris Kearns Goodwin
I think few laws have had so much effect on so many people. It meant that blue collar workers, a whole generation of blue collar workers, were enabled to go to college, become doctors, lawyers, and engineers, and that their children would grow up in a middle-class family.

The president of Harvard said it would create "unqualified people, the most unqualified of this generation," coming into college. The president of the University of Chicago feared we'd be creating "educational hobos." But these were mature, responsible people, the best of their generation in college.

It shows what happens when you give people who don't have a chance an extraordinary opportunity.

Haynes Johnson
Five years after the war ended, twice as many Americans graduated from college [compared to 1940]. That's just the college part... there were 13 million homes built in the 50s. Eleven million of these with GI loans.... It did transform the country.

And the irony of this... this was the biggest government grant ever. Today people hate the government. This was once there was no debate about it. There's no controversy about it. There's no ideological argument about it.

Michael Beschloss
This had much greater impact on bringing Americans into the middle class than everything Roosevelt had tried to do over eight years in the 1930s.

At the time that the bill was debated in Congress it passed only by a very slim margin, and, in fact, a lot -- particularly Republicans -- said let's not pass this thing because a big part of the GI Bill was to give returning vets $20 a week for 52 weeks. They felt it would encourage sloth; that people would not try to get jobs. They thought that this would extend the welfare state, rather than do the opposite. [Emphasis mine.]

----------------------------

The more things change, the more they remain the same. 'Nuff said.

Michael J. Fox to His Kids when They Complain: "A Lady Had a Baby in a Tree!"

I'm a big admirer of both Micheal J. Fox and Ellen DeGeneres, so I loved this video clip:



I particularly liked his comments that reinforce my oft-repeated saying that "I have two diseases: Parkinson's disease and John Schappi's disease." (This is an adaptation of a comment I first heard from the moderator of my PD support group, who is a 25-year Parkinson's survivor.)

I think the same concept applies to everyone dealing with ailments. Yes, Parkinson's may be a bit more idiosyncratic than most diseases. But I don't believe there's any condition where "one size fits all." Drugs and rehabilitative therapies can create as many individual, specific results as there are people who use them. For that reason, it's vital we assume active roles in managing our own health care.

Getting back to Michael J. Fox....  He became famous -- and beloved -- playing Alan P. Keaton on the sitcom Family Ties. His other successes include the Back to the Future trilogy, and his award-winning lead role on Spin City, from which  he retired in 2000. That same year, he launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, which has become one of the world's leading organizations in the search for a cure.

I highly recommend his memoir, the New York Times bestseller, Lucky Man.

Finally, here's what Michael said in a recent interview about coming to terms with the disease:

I don’t look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don’t think I’m scrappy. I’m accepting. I say "living with" or "working through" Parkinson’s. Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it. I look at it like I’m a fluid that’s finding the fissures and cracks and flowing through.

Parkinson's, Genealogy and Risk of Prostate Cancer and Melanoma

After a week of posting about our miserable political system, it's a relief to get back to the real world of dealing with Parkinson's and aging and an aching back. Tackling these issues isn't as depressing as our politics. (I'm only half joking.)

Here's a just released study that I found interesting:

A recent study from Archives of Neurology suggests that people with Parkinson's disease (PD) may carry a higher risk for both melanoma (a form of skin cancer) and prostate cancer. I guess I'm Exhibit A, since I have PD and prostate cancer. I've also been treated twice for melanoma.

According to the research paper, the risk runs both ways. Those with PD have an increased risk of prostate cancer and those with prostate cancer have an increased risk of PD. The study analyzed the Utah Population Database, which includes personal and family information for over two million individuals. Amazingly, some of those records provide family information for more than 15 generations.

Here's a summary of the findings:

• An increased risk for PD was associated with an increased risk for both prostate cancer and melanoma.
• Prostate cancer was diagnosed in 212 individuals who died with PD, compared with a normal expected risk of only 124.
• There was elevated risk for prostate cancer among first-, second-, and third-degree relatives of people whn died with Parkinson's disease.
• There was significantly increased risk of death from PD among 22,147 men with a diagnosis of prostate cancer.
• Melanoma and prostate cancer were the only cancers in significant excess among those with PD. Colorectal, lung, pancreas, and stomach cancers were observed at lower than expected rates.

Note: Statistical analyses like these only show an association and do not prove cause and effect.

PD and Melanoma

The reported link between melanoma and PD is not new. For years, researchers have noted that people with PD carry a higher risk for melanoma. They've also debated whether that elevated risk is caused by having PD or taking levodopa, the gold-standard therapy for the disease. The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) has funded research to further investigate this association. 

In a 2010 interview with MJFF, Susan Bressman, chairman of the department of neurology at Beth Israel Center, explained why levodopa might make someone more likely to develop melanoma:

Levodopa is needed to make the skin pigment melanin. So it makes sense that if you introduce excess levodopa into the system or hype up the system in any way, you could increase risk for melanoma. The usual precaution a neurologist would take for a patient with a history of melanoma is to be cautious about treatment with dopaminergics.

Still, according to Bressman, recent studies have found that having PD causes the melanoma risk, not taking the drugs. While the jury is still out on what causes the PD-melanoma link, PD patients and their doctors should always be vigilant for signs of skin cancer.

I'll continue my annual checkups with my dermatologist. And I'll resolve, once again, to wear a cap and apply sunscreen when I go outside.

PD and Prostate Cancer
I just had my semi-annual checkup with my urologist yesterday and should receive my latest PSA report Friday. After 15 years of slowly increasing PSA numbers, I saw my PSA reading more than double last September. Then it dropped significantly in March. I asked my urologist yesterday if that unusual spike could be related to the trauma from my car crash in August. He said that the accident might be a factor, since urologists have speculated that stress may affect PSA levels. There's another reason I'm especially interested:  I've been taking curcumin for several months. Studies suggest that curcumin slows the progress of cancers in general, and prostate cancer in particular.

Watch this space next week for an update.

How to Resolve Our Fiscal Crisis: Don't Let Anyone 60 or Older Vote in this Election

I originally planned to title this post "Our Entitlements Make Me Richer and My Children Poorer." But I changed it after reading Bob Laszewski's excellent analysis of both parties' Medicare reform proposals, which I summarized last week. Here's how he began his piece:

Let me start by saying something that will likely surprise you. If I could be king for a day, I would prohibit anyone over the age of 60 from voting in this election. This election is really about the future and the big decisions on the table are about the long-term government spending and entitlement issues that should be made by younger voters who will have to pay for them and will benefit or suffer from them.

We have turned people over 65 -- like me -- into a politically protected class. Because we vote at much higher rates than younger workers, politicians of both parties are afraid to touch our Social Security and Medicare benefits. Those programs must be revised to reflect the longer life expectancy and greater wealth of today's retirees. We must lighten the burden on our children and grandchildren, whose taxes support those programs, and who cannot save enough to fund their own retirements.

It is a long-standing axiom in America that every generation will live more comfortably than the last. I always know I'd do better than my father. Why shouldn't I? Shortly after I was born in 1929, my father lost his job and struggled to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s. In contrast, I graduated from college and entered the workforce in the early 1950s as the postwar boom took off.

Most of my contemporaries agree that it will be exceedingly difficult for our children and grandchildren to do as well as we did. Even if the adverse effects of the Great Recession fade with time, the younger generations will be saddled with the costs of an aging population and the expense of infrastructure maintenance deferred this past decade because of several futile wars.

The optimism that always defined Americans is being replaced with anger, since so many young people no longer assume they'll be better off than their parents.

Newsweek recently referred to Millennials as the "screwed generation." Here's what some of them have to say:



The Lucky Generation
My generation, those born between 1925 and 1945, is wedged between the better known "Greatest Generation" that grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s and won World War II... and the "Baby Boom Generation" born in the two decades following the end of the war in 1945. In an earlier post I suggested that my generation should be called the "Lucky Generation," since we didn't have to fight in WWII and started working during the "Golden Age" for the U.S. economy -- the post-war boom years of 1947 to 1977. Here are some other ways we were lucky:

•  For most of our working years, our retirement security rested on a three-legged stool: 1) Social security; 2) an employer-provided  pension plan with guaranteed benefits; and 3) our own savings.  Toward the end of our careers, the second leg of that stool began to wobble, but we still benefited from it in the earlier years. 
•  Most of us built up equity in our houses through the boom years when real estate prices only went up. The 2008 recession -- and the collapse of the real estate bubble -- did not hurt us the way it has younger home owners.
•  Only  nine percent of Americans over 65 had incomes below the poverty line in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. By contrast, 13.7 percent of the general population was living in poverty.
•  The median net worth of households headed by an adult 65 or older rose 42 percent in real terms between 1984 and 2009, to $170,404. During the same period, the median net worth of a household headed by an adult younger than 35 shrank 68 percent to $3,662, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.
•  Households headed by someone 75 or older had the highest net worth: $216,800.

The Younger Generations -- The Baby Boomers and the Millennials

Contrasted with my "Lucky Generation,"  here's what the younger generations face:

•  Chances are, the young will pay for today's elderly without themselves receiving comparable support. The ratio of workers to retirees, 5-to-1 in 1960, fell to 3-to-1 in 2010. That ratio is projected to slip to nearly 2-to-1 by 2025.
•  The traditional employer-sponsored retirement plans benefited people my age. (I took my benefits, based on my 40-year career with the same employer, in a lump-sum -- $800,000!) These plans have disappeared. Fewer than half of the nation's private sector workers have 401(k) plans, and more than a third of households have no retirement coverage during their work lives, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College
• The Baby Boomers nearing retirement (people 55 to 65) on average had just $54,000  in 401(k) plans in 2010 and only $120,000 in all retirement accounts. And we're asking these workers to pay taxes to fund my Social Security benefits!
•  Today's workers don't have significant wealth in other assets to fall back on. Households in the 55-to-64 age bracket lost a third of their net worth between 2007 and 2010, leaving them with an average net worth of $179,000.
• The Census Bureau just reported that last year the 60 percent of households earning between roughly $20,000 and $101,000, earned 46.6 percent of all income, compared with 1990 when they earned over 50 percent of the income.

Where Does That Leave Us?
Joseph Stiglitz, in his new book, The Price of Inequality, sums it up pretty well:

America's inequality is undermining its values and identity.... America has become a country not "with justice for all" but rather with favoritism for the rich [and elderly] and justice for those who can afford it.

He warns of a society governed by "rules of the game that weaken the bargaining strength of workers vis-a-vis capital." At present, he says "the dearth of jobs and the asymmetries in globalization have created competition for jobs in which workers have lost and the owners of capital have won." We are becoming a country "in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools, and have access to first-rate medical care. Meanwhile the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education, and in effect rationed health care."

Data just released shows inequality increasing and the trends moving toward Stiglitz's pessimistic vision of the future. Just last week the Census Bureau reported that income inequality increased by 1.6 percent during 2011, the biggest one-year increase in almost two decades. There's slim likelihood of change, no matter who wins the November election.

Living in Washington all these years, I've participated in marches for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, anti-war protests, the "Million Man March," and others. Even with my back pains, I'd participate if young people were marching today to protest the inequality they are being subjected to by a government that taxes them to pay benefits to well-off seniors like me. But they aren't.

With our loss of optimism and belief in the American Dream, we seem to have lost our determination to fight for a fair deal for all. Instead, the zest for a fight seems to come from those who want to protect what they have and don't want to be taxed to help the less fortunate. Meanwhile, the Democrats, the party that fought for the New Deal and the Fair Deal, continue to find it politically rewarding to use demagoguery to attack the other party whenever it talks about revising entitlements.

Politicians of both parties assume that we seniors are greedy old geezers who will vote against anyone who proposes increasing our taxes or reducing our benefits. Are they right? What do you think?

Memory: Two Updates

At 83, I count my blessings that I am

• still living in my own house, 
• managing quite well on my own, 
• enjoying a pretty jam-packed retirement, 
• coping well with my various afflictions, and 
• feeling happy and contented most of the time

I've got two progressive diseases -- Parkinson's and prostate cancer -- but strangely enough I don't spend much time worrying about them. I worry more that the lousy short-term memory I've had most of my life is getting worse. Dementia – and its more acute cousin, Alzheimer’s – are my greatest fears.

Two articles about memory recently hit my inbox. One gave encouraging news about brain structure; the other focused on the role of genetics.

Brain Cells Don’t Keep Dying Off as We Age
Last month, a Johns Hopkins "Health Alert" reported that our brains do not experience a massive loss of cells as we get older, contrary to long-held beliefs. In fact, as science progresses, we learn more and more about the brain’s amazing plasticity – its ability to grow and change, and even “heal” itself.

Maybe most encouraging of all, there is considerable growth of new cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that consolidates our memories.

The article makes the point that our brains are organs, like our hearts and lungs. Brains are affected by the same things -- like diet and exercise -- that affect our other organs. While it may not be “news,” it’s good to read again that we have some measure of control over the quality and duration our memories, through the lifestyle choices we make.

What We Don’t Control: Genes
Another article was reported by Dr. Shari Barnett of ABC News. She told the story of Ralph Light, 94, an active gardener, living with his wife of 68 years, reader of two or three novels a week... and brother of four siblings who lived long, dementia-free lives.

Barnett reports on a study conducted by Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which examined 277 dementia-free male veterans, all 75 or older, to measure levels of C-reactive protein. Higher levels of this substance are associated with increased dementia risk. The question becomes: how have men with high levels of C-reactive protein – who also have no evidence of cognitive impairment – managed to develop some kind of “immunity” to dementia? The answer could have powerful implications in the quest for treatment, and even prevention, of Alzheimer's.

This study, and another similar follow-up investigation, included interviews with relatives of these mentally healthy vets with high C-reactive protein levels. Results were not surprising: the study subjects who were “resistant” to high C-reactive protein levels were 30% less likely to have relatives with dementia.

Yes, it's another validation that our DNA deals us a hand we’re stuck with. But we can still play it cleverly.

Dr. John Messmer, associate professor of family and community medicine at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania, commented on the study:

Mr. Light's family likely has a good genetic profile plus a lifetime of physical activity and is not overweight or a smoker. And he is engaged in life. All the research being done on dementia may one day help us to understand it better, but for now, there are basic recommendations to reduce one's risk: do not use tobacco, maintain a strictly normal weight (BMI under 25), exercise regularly, eat a diet high in vegetables and fruits, stay engaged in the community.

Check, check, check, and check.