Hope is a tricky thing. It can be difficult to decide what to hope for, how much emotion to invest in that hope and how to transfer hope from frustrated outcomes to new ones. After all, the psychological cost of fallen hopes is high—especially so when those hopes are for significant progress towards the treatment or cure of a life-stealing disease. A disease like Alzheimer’s. The field of Alzheimer’s disease research has taken some hits lately, in the form of some disappointingly failed clinical trials [...]

Many people suffering from depression don’t seriously contemplate treatment when considering only themselves and their own experience of life. This truth is sad, of course, but also consistent with the effects of depression itself. For such people, sometimes only when they perceive how the disease has negatively impacted others (e.g., family relationships, job performance) do they “surrender” to treatment. And afterwards, they regret having held out for so long, especially when they regain some of the self-worth stolen from them by their depression. Can you [...]

I just want to do the best for my son. When he was in second grade, the notes starting coming home. The calls to pick him up early from school. Unruly? Defiant? Whatever...sometimes you just get one of those teachers… But honestly, I began to see some of the same behaviors at home. I didn’t want to accept it, but it was true—sometimes. Most of the time, he was the same happy, energetic kid he’d always been. But increasingly, he’d fall into distracted, sullen fits, [...]

None of the parenting books you read told you about what it would be like to discover him passed out and pale at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. None of your plans for celebrating high school graduation included an appointment with a lawyer to discuss options for his DUI. And certainly, none of your parenting chats with friends and family prepared you for the day you kicked your kid out of the house until he agreed to go to rehab. But you—somehow—managed. Your kid agreed [...]

We all intuitively know that childhood is a critical window for cognitive development. And research massively backs our intuition. Opportunities to build strengths and resilience are seized--or missed--during the childhood years. And the more we learn, the greater the benefits of addressing cognitive issues during childhood seem to be. To take just one recent example, consider the results of a recent, large-scale and long-term study published in JAMA Psychiatry (also described briefly here). Studying more than 4000 individuals, from birth through age 20, the work [...]

A new study tracking over 5000 patients for up to 10 years reports a significant association of blood A1C levels (often used as a risk factor for pre-diabetes and diabetes) and cognitive decline (in cognition, memory and executive functioning). Importantly, the analysis adjusted for other possible contributors to cognitive decline that can also occur in diabetes patients, such as obesity and depression. Although more work needs to be done to establish just how A1C levels may impact cognitive decline--and eventually, dementia--it seems clear that at [...]

The search for a viable drug to combat Alzheimer's keeps taking hits, with a few more drugs-in-trial proving ineffective: http://www.chicagotribune.com/…/sc-hlth-why-alzheimers-is-h… This is maybe not so surprising; Alzheimer's is a notoriously complicated disease, and high-powered research on it has really ramped up only over the last decade. Untangling its root causes, markers and opportunities for intervention will take time! And it will probably happen incrementally, with occasional fits and starts. In the meantime, we at Neurologics are excited about the proven ability of our advanced Brain [...]