Preventive Neurology

Age is a disease vs. Ageing as a natural biological process: have your say  #PreventiveNeurology #HealthyAgeing I have always cracked the joke 'that life is a sexually transmitted neurodegenerative disease with a 100% mortality' . This usually gets a mutated laugh until people start pondering the implications of the joke and realise that I am being serious. Evolution never designed, and selected, the human brain and nervous system to function much past 35 years of age. It is only relatively recently that life expectancy has increased with the requirement of our brains to function into old age. It is clear that when we measure cognitive function, and brain volume, it is all downhill from about 35 years of age. Those of us who are older than 35 notice the subtle cognitive impairments that increase with age and the gradual malfunction of our nervous systems. When last have you tried tight-rope walking? Your failing balance system is simply a reflection of the global rot t...

Should we redefine ageing as a disease? #BrainHealth #ProfG #HealthyAgeing Most of neurologists equate amyloid deposition in the brain with Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study questions this assumption and suggests that amyloid deposition is simply a part of normal ageing. Demographics, the APOE genotype and midlife dyslipidaemia was associated with amyloid deposition. In comparison obesity, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiac and metabolic conditions, but not intellectual enrichment, were associated with greater AD-pattern neurodegeneration.  These results in elderly individuals supports the hypothesis that tackling common lifestyle factors obesity, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiac and metabolic conditions could prevent, or at least, delay the onset of symptomatic AD and is consistent with the falling incidence of AD in both the Cambridge and Framingham cohort studies.  Please note that although the incidence (number of new cases per 100,000 pe...