Deans' stroke musings: We may finally know how cognitive reserve protects against Alzheimer's

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

We may finally know how cognitive reserve protects against Alzheimer's

You do expect your competent? doctor to know about all the research that went into this article and have EXACT PROTOCOLS to create cognitive reserve? Oh, you don't have a functioning stroke doctor, do you?

We may finally know how cognitive reserve protects against Alzheimer's

Why does mental effort lead to a more resilient brain that can withstand dementia and decline? We are now discovering the mechanisms behind this cognitive reserve, opening up new ways to boost it

By Anthea Rowan

18 October 2023 New Scientist Default Image

Brett Ryder

IF I never thought about dementia before, I thought of little else after the condition manifested in my mother. The odd thing was that dementia – Alzheimer’s disease, in her case – didn’t occur to me until she asked, out of the blue, when we had first met.

My failure to recognise the extent of her cognitive decline was born partly of denial, but also because she was doubtless compensating for her galloping brain damage, taking cerebral detours around the potholes dug by her condition. After all, she had done this before. Following a stroke four years previously, she had lost the ability to read; after much hard work, she learned the skill again.

So how come this ability to adapt, which seemed to sustain her after her stroke, was unable to withstand the pathology of dementia? This also made me think about my own resilience to cognitive decline and what, if anything, I could do about it.

We have known for almost three decades that some peoples’ brains can function normally even when riddled with the plaques and other damage associated with dementia, due to an enigmatic capacity called cognitive reserve. Yet despite growing evidence of its importance, it has been challenging to pin down how this quality operates in the brain. Now, we are finally beginning to understand the mechanisms that underlie cognitive reserve, opening up possible new dementia treatments and fresh ideas about how we can protect our thinking abilities into old age. And it turns out that obsessing about learning another language or doing a daily crossword might be missing the bigger picture.