Blood Test May Predict Alzheimer’s Progression

With your very likely chance of getting this, shouldn't your doctor be testing for this and preparing Alzheimers prevention protocols for you to use? Isn't that your doctors' responsibility?  Yes this is in familial but I bet it works for regular Alzheimers too, that is also your doctors' responsibility to know about. 

YOUR DOCTORS' RESPONSIBILITY!

The reason you need dementia prevention: 

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.

2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.

3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

4. Dementia Risk Doubled in Patients Following Stroke September 2018 

5. Parkinson’s Disease May Have Link to Stroke March 2017

Blood Test May Predict Alzheimer’s Progression

Test detects familial Alzheimer's damage before symptoms appear

• by Judy George, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today January 21, 2019

A blood test predicted disease progression and brain neurodegeneration at very early stages of familial Alzheimer's disease, researchers reported.
Serum neurofilament light chain (NfL) levels correlated with NfL levels in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and were elevated at pre-symptomatic stages of familial Alzheimer's disease, according to Mathias Jucker, PhD, of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues.
Up to 16 years before the calculated onset of dementia symptoms, there were noticeable changes in blood, they reported in Nature Medicine.
The rate of change of serum NfL was key: "It is not the absolute neurofilament concentration but its temporal evolution which is meaningful and allows predictions about the future progression of the disease," Jucker said in a statement.
These findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting NfL might be used clinically as a blood biomarker for Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.
"This is something that would be easy to incorporate into a screening test in a neurology clinic," co-author Brian Gordon, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. "We validated it in people with Alzheimer's disease because we know their brains undergo lots of neurodegeneration, but this marker isn't specific for Alzheimer's. High levels could be a sign of many different neurological diseases and injuries."
When brain neurons are damaged or dying, they release the NfL protein, which leaks into CSF and blood. Rising levels of NfL in CSF signal neuron loss in stroke, traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and other neurodegenerative conditions.
This study assessed 405 people from the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Network (DIAN), a consortium led by Washington University. Participants in DIAN carry one of the gene mutations (APP, PSEN1, PSEN2) known to cause dominantly inherited Alzheimer's disease. The cohort offers a unique opportunity for researchers to develop accurate predictions about whether and when a family member will develop dementia: a parent with one of these mutations has a 50% chance of passing the genetic error to a child, and a child who inherits a variant is all but guaranteed to develop symptoms of dementia around the same age as the parent.
The researchers examined 243 DIAN participants who carried an early-onset genetic variant and 162 unaffected relatives as controls. DIAN participants were evaluated at baseline and at subsequent follow-up visits (annually to every third year) with blood and CSF tests, imaging, and cognitive tests.
NfL levels in CSF (n=187) and serum (n=405) correlated with one another and were elevated before dementia symptoms occurred. Longitudinal, within-person analysis of serum NfL (n=196) confirmed this elevation, and showed that the rate of change of serum NfL could discriminate mutation carriers from non-mutation carriers almost a decade earlier than cross-sectional absolute NfL levels -- 16.2 versus 6.8 years before the estimated symptom onset.
The serum NfL rate of change peaked in participants converting from the pre-symptomatic to the symptomatic stage of Alzheimer's and was associated with cortical thinning on MRI. Serum NfL also predicted cognitive changes assessed by the Mini–Mental State Examination and Logical Memory test over a 2-year period.
"These results suggest that in the context of Alzheimer's disease pathology -- currently measured by CSF amyloid or amyloid PET, but potentially in the future by blood amyloid -- serum NfL could prognosticate the rate of disease progression and potentially be utilized in clinical trials as a surrogate endpoint," observed Michelle Mielke, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who was not involved in the research.
"The authors correctly point out that additional studies are needed over the clinical and pathological course of sporadic Alzheimer's patients, especially because sporadic Alzheimer's patients are older and are more likely to have co-existent vascular and other brain pathology which can also impact serum NfL levels," Mielke told MedPage Today.
"Regardless, the current findings are promising and elegantly highlight the potential clinical use of this blood-based marker," she said.
Future analyses are needed to more accurately pinpoint when serum NfL rate of change is a better predictor of neurodegeneration and cognitive decline than absolute NfL, Jucker noted. And because neurofilaments also accumulate in the blood during the course of other neurodegenerative disorders, this test is only conditionally suitable for diagnosing Alzheimer's. "However, the test accurately shows the course of the disease and is therefore a powerful instrument for investigating novel Alzheimer's therapies in clinical trials," he said.

Data collection and sharing for this project was supported by DIAN (funded by the National Institute on Aging) and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. Additional support came from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre, and the MRC Dementias Platform U.K.
Researchers reported relationships with Cognition Therapeutics, Biogen, GlaxoSmithKline, Illumina, Eisai, AbbVie, Pfizer, Denali Therapeutics, Genentech, Roche Diagnostics, Araclon/Grifols, and DiamiR.

• Primary Source

  Nature Medicine

  Source Reference: Preische O, et al "Serum neurofilament dynamics predicts neurodegeneration and clinical progression in presymptomatic Alzheimer's Disease" Nature Medicine 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41591-018-0304-3.

Study: Memories of music cannot be lost to Alzheimer's and dementia

With your very likely chance of getting dementia poststroke maybe your doctor should prescribe music as a stroke therapy and possible preventative to dementia. But I'm not medically trained so don't listen to me. Listen to your doctors answer to; 'How do I get 100% recovered?"

• movement music therapy (1)
• music (78)
• music therapy (49)
• musical training (13)
• play a musical instrument (3)
• play an instrument (1)

 

Study: Memories of music cannot be lost to Alzheimer's and dementia 

The part of your brain responsible for ASMR catalogs music, and appears to be a stronghold against Alzheimer's and dementia.

Ned Dymoke

29 April, 2018

Some music inspires you to move your feet, some inspires you to get out there and change the world. In any case, and to move hurriedly on to the point of this article, it's fair to say that music moves people in special ways. 

If you're especially into a piece of music, your brain does something called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), which feels to you like a tingling in your brain or scalp. It's nature's own little "buzz", a natural reward, that is described by some as a "head orgasm". Some even think that it explains why people go to church, for example, "feeling the Lord move through you", but that's another article for another time. 

Turns out that ASMR is pretty special. According to a recently published study in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease (catchy name!), the part of your brain responsible for ASMR doesn't get lost to Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's tends to put people into layers of confusion, and the study confirms that music can sometimes actually lift people out of the Alzheimer's haze and bring them back to (at least a semblance of) normality... if only for a short while. ASMR is powerful stuff! 

This phenomenon has been observed several times but rarely studied properly. One of the most famous examples of this is the story of Henry, who comes out of dementia while listening to songs from his youth:  

Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in Radiology at the Univerity of Utah Health and contributing author on the study, says  "In our society, the diagnoses of dementia are snowballing and are taxing resources to the max. No one says playing music will be a cure for Alzheimer's disease, but it might make the symptoms more manageable, decrease the cost of care and improve a patient's quality of life."

Brain tingling sensation 'ASMR'(Autonomous sensory meridian response) may benefit health

Good luck trying this dangerous stunt without your doctors prescription. Ask your doctor about it.
https://www.mdlinx.com/neurology/top-medical-news/article/2018/06/25/7525944/&

Healthline/Medical News Today | June 25, 2018

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) describes the pleasurable tingling sensation that some people experience in response to stimulating videos, activities, or sounds. Now, new research suggests that ASMR lowers heart rate and improves overall health and well-being.

ASMR is an Internet phenomenon. Over recent years, websites, such as Reddit and YouTube, have seen millions of ASMR videos posted.

Such websites have also witnessed thousands of testimonials from people talking about the relaxing, static-like feeling that they get from specific stimuli, ranging from the sound of whispering to that of crumpling paper.

Reportedly, the sensation starts in the crown of the head and spreads throughout the body.

Dubbed ASMR in 2010 by one Facebook user, the phenomenon has been backed by little scientific research since then. But now, researchers from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom set out to investigate whether science can confirm the anecdotal evidence of ASMR's relaxing benefits.

Giulia Poerio, of the University of Sheffield's Department of Psychology, is the lead author of the study, and the findings are published in the journal PLOS One.

Studying ASMR online and in the laboratory

Poerio explains the motivation for the research, saying that despite there being more than 13 million ASMR-inducing videos on the Internet, "[A]SMR has gone virtually unnoticed in scientific research."

"[This] is why we wanted to examine whether watching ASMR videos reliably produces feelings of relaxation and accompanying changes in the body—such as decreased heart rate."

To do so, Poerio and colleagues conducted two studies: a large online experiment and a laboratory study. In the online research, over 1,000 participants watched ASMR-inducing videos and control videos.

Then, all the participants completed a survey in which they reported how often they experienced ASMR sensations during the videos and what emotional response they had to each video.

Participants who reported experiencing ASMR frequently were also asked questions about what triggered their sensations.

The survey revealed that individuals who experience ASMR frequently also reported higher levels of excitement and calmness, as well as lower levels of stress and sadness.

Moreover, whether the participants were ASMR experiencers or not did not influence how they responded to the control videos.

Just as relaxing as music and mindfulness

Next, they sought to replicate the results of the survey under "controlled laboratory conditions." So, Poerio and colleagues recruited 110 volunteers—including both ASMR experiencers and nonexperiencers—and asked them to watch ASMR-inducing videos as well as control videos.

Like in the online experiment, the participants were all asked to report on the frequency with which they had tingling sensations throughout the video. Also, the researchers took some physiological measurements, such as heart rate and skin conductance response, of the participants.

The measurements were taken both at the beginning of the study and while the participants were watching the videos.

The laboratory experiment revealed that ASMR experiencers had a much slower heart rate when watching ASMR videos compared with those who had never experienced the brain sensations.

Specifically, the heart rates of the ASMR experiencers were, on average, 3.14 beats per minute lower than those of nonexperiencers.

Poerio comments on the significance of these results, saying, "Our studies show that ASMR videos do indeed have the relaxing effect anecdotally reported by experiencers—but only in people who experience the feeling."

"This was reflected in ASMR participants' self-reported feelings and objective reductions in their heart rates compared to non-ASMR participants," she adds.

"What's interesting is that the average reductions in heart rate experienced by our ASMR participants was comparable to other research findings on the physiological effects of stress reduction techniques such as music and mindfulness."

–Giulia Poerio

To read more, click here.