Articles in the NY Times

On my daily walk I stop at Starbucks and sometimes read the left over copies of the NY Times. Today's read had some very interesting articles on Alzheimer and ADHD. The result of the research put together by US researchers and data collected in Italy seems to point to a breakthrough in discovery of the condition. Manipulating the condition is the tough part although you need to know the color and spots of the animal in order to hunt it down.

The NY times has a great article for reference for understanding the disease from a consumer's perspective. This article will give the reader a general understanding of the condition.

Sue and I had attended and interesting conference of our state speech therapist convention down in Long Beach about 10 years ago. Our field has been flooded with clients that think that they had Alzheimer and wanted specific therapies developed for it. A differential diagnosis had to be developed to differentiate between dementia and Alzheimer's disease. They were in the middle of doing studies with adult clients who came to the adult day care for their therapy, rehab, and social interaction. At that time and up to fairly recently the only definitive studies were done on patients that were deceased and allowed for their brains to be studied before death with very expensive MRI technology and cell studies after death.

The current studies are finding that some cells, the ones that allow us to multitask and to move to the daydream thoughts without focus do not get flushed out as quickly into the spinal fluid with clients with Alzheimer conditions as those with non Alzheimer pathology. So if medical research can find a way to enhance this action, it may be the key to maintaining directed thought in these clients.

This is an interesting movement in this field.

: ) Pat