A recent report by a panel of experts from the US National Institutes of Health has cast some doubt on the usefulness of a healthy diet, crossword puzzles and regular exercise in terms of delaying or reducing the severity of Alzheimer’s disease. As the CBC reported, the panel expressed their doubt thus: “We wish we [...]

An innovative collaboration between research groups in Beijing,  China and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada is leading to a better understanding of the state of the aging population in China. Led in Canada by Dr. Kenneth Rockwood of the Geriatric Medicine Research Unit (GMRU) and in China by Dr. Xianghua Fang at the Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, a [...]

Drs Kenneth Rockwood and Xioawei Song are currently seeking volunteers for a brain imaging study for perfusion in Alzheimer’s disease. The study is seeking to recruit both cognitively normal volunteers, as well as those who have been diagnosed with mild Alzheimer’s. The study uses a non-invasive brain imaging method called Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).  Brain [...]

New research from the University of Edinburgh has shown that stress raises the risk of memory loss and cognitive decline among older people with diabetes.  The researchers studied more than 900 men and women aged between 60 and 75 with type-2 diabetes and evaluated their mental abilities with a range of tests, including memory function [...]

New research, due to be published in the April edition of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, reports that older adults who “have more money, engage in more social activities, and whose friends approve more of drinking are more likely to engage in excessive or high-risk drinking.” Rudolf H. Moos, senior research career scientist for the [...]

New research published this week in Psychological Science has shown that while older brains have more difficulty filtering out extraneous information than younger brains, they appear to make great use of this information. Karen Campbell, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Toronto, working with the Rotman Institute, says “We found that older [...]

A new systematic review from the Sydney Medical School at the University of Sydney in Ryde, Australia, has shown that giving people living in nursing facilities vitamin D can reduce the rate of falls. The Cochrane review, led by Dr. Ian Cameron examined 41 previous trials involving 25,422 older people, who were mostly women.  “Five [...]

The Alzheimer Society of Canada has released Rising Tide: the Impact of Dementia on Canadian Society, This is the final report of an Alzheimer Society project funded by Pfizer Canada, Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and RX&D. Currently in Canada, there are 103,700 new cases of [...]

Medical News Today reports that researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have unveiled results from a study that they say has pinpointed the identifying factors in who, among those 65+, will be at greatest risk for major depression. The researchers studied data from over 600 people aged 65+, who had no active diagnosis [...]

Three American scientists Elizabeth Blackburn (University of California, San Fransisco) , Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins University) and Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical School), have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. In short: “Telomeres are the tails of chromosomes; they are an [...]