Word: strokings
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...seemed to have escaped the confusion and memory loss that make this form of dementia so devastating. The reason? As Snowdon and his team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week, these nuns, unlike their counter-parts whose symptoms were severe, had not suffered from strokes--particularly the small strokes so commonplace in the elderly. Only 57% of the stroke-free nuns developed dementia, compared with 93% of nuns with a history of ministrokes...
...link between stroke and dementia is not new, but seldom has it been called out so clearly. One reason is that Snowdon and his team had access to a sizable control group and thus were able to compare brain tissue of normal people with that of diseased individuals. In 41 nuns who did not have Alzheimer's-like brains, researchers found, strokes caused no measurable decrease in overall mental competence. But in nuns with Alzheimer's, just one or two strokes--small strokes that left swirls of dead tissue no bigger than a pencil tip--were enough to trigger...
...Allen Roses, carry an Alzheimer's-susceptibility gene known as Apo-E4, which produces a protein that appears to affect tau. Individuals who carry two copies of this gene, Roses has shown, have an elevated risk of developing Alzheimer's before age 70. And if they suffer a stroke, warns another report published in last week's J.A.M.A., they are more likely to develop full-blown dementia...
...calling attention to the unhealthy synergy between Alzheimer's and stroke, the School Sisters of Notre Dame have performed an enormous service. But they're not yet finished with their work. Long-term epidemiological studies, like fine wines, improve with age, and thus new findings from the Nun Study can be expected to enrich medical knowledge for many years to come. Indeed, long after he and his colleagues retire, Snowdon imagines, nuns like Sister Mary will continue to enlighten Alzheimer's researchers. This, of course, is the point. "These women were teachers all their lives," says Snowdon, "and now they...
...stroke that paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby was cruelly premature, at least death had the courtesy to wait until the 45-year-old French journalist finished his last assignment. Less than 72 hours after readers and critics alike hailed as a triumph his memoir of living with locked-in syndrome--a state of virtually total paralysis that leaves the victim, in Bauby's words, "like a mind in a jar"--the former editor in chief of French Elle magazine died. Bauby's book Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Bubble and the Butterfly) is a celebration of life written...