ProCPR Blog

This is an interesting twist of events that surprised even the researchers at the University of South Florida.  Cellphone radiation may be good for you and bad for you at the same time.  Tests on mice suggest that long-term cellphone use might actually help to fend off some of the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings are exactly the opposite of what they expected to find.  They say that exposure to electromagnetic waves from cellphones could both prevent some of the effects of Alzheimer’s if the exposure is introduced in early adulthood, or potentially even reverse some of the impairment among those already memory-impaired.

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Eating a “heart healthy” diet and maintaining or increasing participation in moderate physical activity may help preserve our memory and thinking abilities as we age, according to new research reported today at the Alzheimer’s Association 2009 International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD 2009) in Vienna.

“We can’t do anything about aging or family history, but research continues to show us that there are lifestyle decisions we all can make to keep our brains healthier, and that also may lower our risk of memory decline as we age,” said William Thies, PhD, Chief Medical & Scientific Officer at the Alzheimer’s Association.

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Moderate alcohol intake, especially wine, has been associated with reduced risk of dementia in middle aged adults. It is not known whether this association is also true for older adults or those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Kaycee Sink, MD, MAS, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine, Section on Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC, and colleagues sought to determine the relationship between alcohol intake and incident dementia in 3,069 community-living adults aged 75 years and older without dementia who were enrolled in the Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory Study (GEMS), an NIH-sponsored study of ginkgo biloba for prevention of dementia. At the beginning of the study, 2,587 of the participants were assessed to be cognitively normal and 482 had MCI.

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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common among veterans returning from combat and there is some evidence that it may be associated with reduced cognitive function. However, no study has yet investigated if PTSD increases the risk of developing dementia.

To address this emerging issue, Kristine Yaffe, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Epidemiology and Associate Chair of Research for the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry and Director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, and colleagues sought to determine if PTSD is associated with risk of developing dementia among older veterans in the U.S. receiving treatment in veterans’ medical centers.

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