Obama Administration Starts Work On National Alzheimer’s Plan

0 comments

Posted on 15th September 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

, ,

With dementia threatening to drain Medicare and Medicaid funds, the Obama administration is crafting a National Alzheimer’s Plan, according to the Associated Press.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/14/u-s-prepares-a-national-plan-for-alzheimers/

The aim is to create a strategy that will “combine  research aimed at fighting he mind-destroying disease with help that caregivers need to stay afloat,” AP reported Tuesday.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease included, is the bane of Baby Boomers. Some are saddled with the duty of dealing with, emotionally and financially, the burden of caring for elderly parents stricken with dementia. And secondly, boomers face the frightening prospect of developing Alzheimer’s disease themselves, a malady that has no cure yet.

There are 5.4 million American’s with either Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, and it is the sixth-leading killer, according to AP. And that’s nothing compared to the future of Baby Boomers. It’s estimated that by 2050 13 million to 16 million Americans will have Alzheimer’s, and that they will generate $1 trillion in medical and nursing-home costs, AP said. 

Caregivers, who often go broke paying for care for loved ones with dementia, are clamoring for a national game plan on the matter.  And they are asking some hard questions, like why the National Institutes of Health are shelling out roughly six times more for research on AIDS than on Alzheimer’s.

Why indeed?  

 

 

Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.

Some Brain Areas Are Strictly Devoted To Language, MIT Study Finds

0 comments

Posted on 5th September 2011 by gjohnson in Uncategorized

A study released last week by MIT indicates that certain parts of the brain are just dedicated to language, which the school called “a finding that marks a major advance in the search for brain regions specialized for sophisticated mental functions.”

 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-brain-0830.html

The study was lead by Evelina Fedorenko, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. It was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study addressed a question that’s dogged brain researchers: Does functional specificity apply to language? Scientists know that there are distinct parts of the brain that handle certain tasks, for example, moving your tongue or your fingers.

But functional specificity is harder to pin down and prove when more complex tasks are involved, such as language.

“Are there special brain regions for those activities, or do they use general-purpose areas that service whatever tasks are asked?” MIT said in a press release on the new study.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the tool that researchers use to detect, locate and measure brain activity associated with cognitive tasks.

The MIT team took a new approach to fMRI in order to isolate parts of the brain dedicated to language. In the past, according to MIT, “fMRI studies of language are typically done by group analysis, meaning that researchers test 10, 20 or even 50 subjects, then average data together onto a common brain space to search for regions that are active across brains.”

But Fedorenko believed that for the most accuracy, fMRI data should be studied for each subject individually, so in other words, “patterns of activity in one brain would only be compared to patterns of activity from that same brain.”

So in the MIT research, scientists during the first part of the fMRI had their subjects do a complex language task, a “functional localizer,” while they tracked brain activity.

Next, researchers had subjects do seven tasks relating to things such as math, music, memory and cognitive control, which Fedorenko said are functions “most commonly argued to share neural machinery with language.”

As it turned out, eight of the nine brain regions that MIT studied didn’t exhibit activity for the seven non-language tasks.

According to the study, the findings point to a “striking degree of functional specificity for language.”

 MIT plans to continue its research on this topic, and it looks like it’s done some ground-breaking work already.

 

 

 

Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.