Dementia

...ba href=/dementia/a/b.

Created: 3/27/2006 7:51:31 PM Updated: 3/27/2006 7:54:47 PM © 2006 First Coast News.

All rights reserved.

This material may not be published, rewritten, or redistributed.

More Local News: Jacksonville Man on Burning Cruise Ship Shares His StoryWoman Thrown From Car After Being Rear-Ended Passes AwayPhotographer Ansel Adams Prints on Display at Cummer Museum12 Who Care: Marilyn McGuireFirst Coast Family: Two Moms Reach Out to Other Moms with PodcastingWildfire Risk High, Dozens of Acres on First Coast BurnedFlagler College Adding New BuildingMayo Clinic Doctor Promoting Program to Help African Americans Affected by Memory DisordersLocal Golfers Tee Off to Benefit Kids with Spina BifidaGator Mania Sweeping Gainesville Firstcoastnews.com Top 3 Stories: 1.

Movie Filming Causes Hostage Crisis in Fernandina Beach 2.

Robbie Knievel Finally Comes Through For Fans 3.

High School Teen Accused of Baking Marijuana into Class Project Return to Local News ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Top of page Site Map ...

...ba href=/dementia/a/b.

Her only son, at 59, was trying to understand his own "guilt and anger and frustration".

Guilt because, even while paying for the best care, he believed he had "got it wrong" by consigning his mother to a non-life.

Anger because, as a society, we respond to advancing age with a mixture of neglect and denial.

We don't pay properly for care or for carers.

We don't – and this probably explains everything – want to remember that life ends for all of us.

Robinson's frustration sprang, I think, from something simple: the eagerness to forget that the old are people too.

His own mother's eyes might have flickered with recognition for a few seconds before she was "called away" by her reveries.

An only son may have found it hard, in his weekly visits, to chatter away – an actor's training helped – to a woman who registered few of his words.

But she was still a person, still alive beneath a vast weight of silence.

The man from Time Team, as you've never seen him before, had taken a vow of honesty.

Yes, he had provided the best of care, but it was still "a nice waiting room for death".

Granted, he was taking responsibility for the woman who had been responsible for his upbringing.

But at 59, having already lost a father to Alzheimer's, he could still confess that his mother's plight "scares me for my own future".

"What I don't understand," he said, "is why nobody talks about this stuff".

Only a very few people are capable of coping, full-time, with an ol...

...ba href=/dementia/a/b have Alzheimer's, de la Monte noted.

"The others have a mixed condition or something else wrong with them," she said.

"There are a number of conditions that people call Alzheimer's disease," de la Monte said.

"People are developing ways of testing insulin resistance in the brain, which will be necessary to validate any therapy that comes out of this." Theory still questioned However, one expert doesn't think that her team has yet made a convincing case for the theory.

"The paper overreaches," said Gandy.

He noted that de la Monte's group injected the rats' brains with Streptozotocin, the compound they used to inhibit local insulin production.

So, it's not clear whether the brain changes her group noted were related to a lack of insulin, or this insult to the brain.

"Streptozotocin, which causes oxidative stress, would be predicted to cause such stress in many tissues, including the brain," Gandy said.

In addition, changes the researchers observed in the brains of the mice were only modest, with no clear structural pathology evident, he said.

Insulin –just a part of the picture Another expert believes insulin's role in Alzheimer's may only be part of the picture.

"There is definitely speculation that insulin is linked to Alzheimer's," said Dr Zoe Arvanitakis, an assistant professor of neurological sciences at Rush University Medical Centre, in Chicago.

"But given the complexity of the illness, it is probably unlikely that addressing a single mechanism of illne...