Lethal Amoeba, Which Attacks Brains, Claims Three Victims This Summer

0 comments

Posted on 21st August 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

, ,

It sounds like something out of science fiction movie, but it’s killed three people so far this summer. The culprit is Naegleria fowleri, a microscopic brain-eating amoeba. 

This amoeba killed a 9-year-old boy in Virginia Aug. 5; a 16-year-old Florida girl two weeks ago; and a Louisiana man in June, according to the New York Post. The illness is causes is called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. 

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/brain_eaters_in_the_water_bUgkuPB6G6MfTb45wEvSPI

Naegleria fowleri lives in warm fresh water and enters the human body through nasal passages. It then travels to the brain “and feeds on cerebral fluid,” according to the Post.

The symptoms of this fatal illness include headaches, vomiting, fever, coma and “an altered mental state,” the Post reported. It is often misdiagnosed as bacterial meningitis.

The Centers for Disease Control determined that there have been 121 cases of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis since 1937 in the United States, and only one survivor.

Swimmers be warned: Avoid stagnant pools of water.    

Study Links Sleep Apnea To Higher Risk Of Dementia For Older Women

0 comments

Posted on 14th August 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

In a disturbing finding, a study has found that elderly women who have sleep apnea are more at risk to develop dementia.

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2011/08/Sleep-apnea-may-raise-dementia-risk-in-women/49910776/1

The study, published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Assocation, involved nearly 300 women who were dementia-free before the research.

http://content.usatoday.com/topics/topic/Journal+of+the+American+Medical+Association

And as it turned out, those subjects who had 15 or more apnea incidents per hour had an 85 percent better chance of experiencing mild cognitive impairment or dementia over the next five years.

When someone has sleep apnea, they briefly stop breathing, and therefore their brains briefly aren’t getting oxygen. Researchers have speculated that this may affect “the way the brain constantly replenishes its cells,” according to USA Today.

Of the 298 women in the study, 105 were tested and found to suffer from sleep apnea. Five years following the study, researchers gave all the women cognitive tests. And when the results were compared, the women who had “sleep-disordered breathing” had a much greater chance of developing dementia and cognitive impairment, according to USA Today.

The study determined that only 31 percent of the women who had regular night-time breathing wound up with cognitive troubles, versus 45 percent of the women who had sleep apnea. USA Today did the math, and wrote “that translate to 85 percent higher relative odds of cognitive impairment.”

The experts say that lots more research needs to be done on this topic.

 For example, one researcher suggested that dementia may cause sleep apnea, not the other way around.

Justice Requires the Brain Injury Voice to Be Heard

0 comments

Posted on 8th August 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

,

I started this blog because I felt that as an advocate, sometimes I needed to comment on American politics, to advance my agenda of finding justice for my clients and others with brain injury. Justice to a significant degree means due process of law, which can be largely reduced to making sure that your full story is heard.

For brain injury survivors, injustice too often happens because their story is never heard by those making judgments about their condition and treatment. And far too much of the reason that the story is never heard is that the doctors don’t know what they should be listening for. Diagnosing and understanding brain injury disability is about the application of clinical wisdom to the individualized facts of the injury and deficits. The only way that a professional can gain that wisdom is by listening to the TBI Voice.

I launched http://tbivoices.com to tell the TBI story. Through the TBI Voices project, we are providing an internet archive of brain injury voices. The goal is to create a comprehensive treatment of the subjective aspects of TBI. Each story includes the voice of the survivor, the context injury and the nature of the treatment and disability. If this archive can become a chorus of brain injury voices, it may influence the diagnosis and treatment of TBI in a way that current research – that is based upon objective measurement of an injury that is exceedingly hard to measure and almost impossible to quantify – cannot.

To date, we have provided a platform for fourteen brain injured people to tell their story. But unlike survivor stories online, each of these stories has a similar structure, is a detailed treatment of the TBI, the severity of the injury, the rehabilitation and recovery process and current ability. http://tbivoices.com is in some way the flipside of the http://www.waiting.com/waitingbridge.html of waiting.com as it is a page filled with hope, a page filled with comebacks, a page of belief in miracles.

Here is the Table of Contents of stories on http://tbivoices.com Each day we post add part of a story on http://tbivoices.com/blog and every 15 days or so begin another story. What is also unique about http://tbivoices.com is that you can hear the survivor’s voice as the  full interviews are posted on Youtube at http://youtube.com/tbivoices

I hope that through this webpage, we can provide a place where the TBI community can be heard.

Attorney Gordon Johnson

Brain Shrinkage Plagues Humans, Not Chimps

0 comments

Posted on 7th August 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

Chimpanzees have a very distinct advantage over humans: Their brains don’t shink as they age.

At least that was the finding of recent study that The Wall Street Journal reported on in an article headlined “Brain Shrinkage: It’s Only Human.”  

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468224286877908.html?KEYWORDS=brain+shrinkage

The human brain can diminish in size, anywhere from 10 percent to 15 percent, as a person ages. And this brain shrinkage is blamed  for dementia, bad memory and even depression, according to The Journal.

Yet chimps don’t face any of these issues. Their brains don’t get smaller as they get older, according to brain-scanning research performed by an anthrohopolist,   Chet Sherwood, at George Washington University.

The studyaccording to The Journal, involved 87 men from 22 to 88 and 99 chimps from 10 to 51 years old. A human’s brain is three pounds, three times the size of a chimp’s brain. 

But no matter how scientists sliced it, while the human’s lost volume in their brains, the chimps’ brains didn’t change.

One theory about this difference is that human’s have a lifespan of 80 years or more, which is double the lifespan of a chimp. 

“During those extra decades of life, natural cell-repair mechanisms may wear out and neural circuits with, the researchers said,” The Journal reported.

At this point, that seems to be the unavoidable cost of living a long life for humans. And those changes can leads to  Alzeimer’s and memory lose for the aged.  Hopefully, the latest research will be a step toward finding a cure for the disease. 

N.J. Researcher Devises Blood-Screening Test To Detect Alzheimer’s Disease

0 comments

Posted on 6th August 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

, ,

Alzheimer’s disease strikes fear in the heart of most Americans. It’s not only a disease that doesn’t have a cure, it’s a disease without a sure-fire way to detect or confirm it’s presence. 

There has been progress made on the testing side of that equation. And last Thursday The Star-Ledger of Newark did a Page One profile of a scientist who has been developing such a test for this dreaded disease.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/08/alzheimers_disease_could_be_re.html

The researcher is Bob Nagele, a doctor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-School of Osteopathic Medicine. After toiling for a decade in his lab in Stratford, N.J., Nagele last week had a paper published by the online journal PLoS One about his test to diagnose Alzheimer’s.

Next week, Nagele will  have an article in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.  

According to The Ledger, Nagele’s Alzheimer’s test entails testing blood, using computor scans to check the nearly 25,000 proteins in blood. The test detects the 10 autoantibodies that a human body makes to fight off Alzheimer’s. If those are present in the drop of blood being tested by Nagele, the person likley has or is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, according to The Ledger. If these antibodies aren’t present, the diagnosis is no Alzheimer’s.

Nagele’s test is far less complicated that the tests currently being used for Alzheimer’s, and “it’s 95 percent accurate  and takes 24 hours to get results,” The Ledger said.

Nagele’s research has focused on the blood-brain barrier, which prevents certain proteins and antibodies in the blood from getting into brain. He believes that people get Alzheimer’s when this blood-brain barrier malfunctions and lets blood plasma into the brain.

The theory is that detecting Alzheimer’s as early as possible could give doctors a jump in trying to slow down its impact on the brain.

Obviously,  Nagele’s research needs to be verified and tested by others. But it looks promising.

At the very least, The Ledger story deserves a look for its graphic illustrating what happens to a person’s brain when they get Alzheimer’s.      

 

u