Alzheimer's & Its Prevention: Listen Up Yuckmouths

[Fat Cat]

If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... o-stop-it/

Here's a really fascinating article on the latest research related to Alzheimer's disease. The ameloid and tau proteins that form in the brain and are associated with the disease may represent our bodies' adaptation to fight bacteria attacking brain tissue. In other words, they are not the cause, but the symptom, of the disease...which is totally different than what I learned in graduate school just a few years back.

If you have a history of dementia in your family (~70 percent of dementia is Alzheimer's-related) or are just interested in some popular science, it's pretty cool.

[baffled]

Interesting. My dad is in the early stages of dementia.

I've been interested in the role sleep, or a lack thereof, plays in the development of dementia.

[Dunn]

Pretty cool. Dementia is a scary thing. The lack of sleep on my career has always made me worry. I’m good on the gym disease though. Lol. Thanks Fats.

[syaigh]

FYI, there is some research to suggest that creatine may help prevent or reverse early dementia.

[baffled]

I'm guessing just regular creatine monohydrate? I remember hearing/reading something about the neuroprotective benefits of creatine like 13 years ago when I was in college, and then promptly forgetting about it.

Ironic.

[Fat Cat]

Sorry about your Dad baffy. That sucks.

[baffled]

Thanks, Fats. He's survived liver cancer, lung cancer, and is living with prostate cancer but never slowed down til his memory began to fade.

He's probably the toughest guy I know.

[Fat Cat]

Sounds like he is a tough man.

Purely by happenstance my wife was walking home from grocery shopping yesterday and saw our good friend’s mom in a park on the way. She stopped to say hi, but the mom—who we’ve known for decades—couldn’t recognize her. She said it was pretty bizarre and chilling.

[Lych]

It's a terrible disease. My Grandma had it. I was her power of attorney from 2013 - 2017 until she died. The chilling part for me was the loss of not just recognition of people, or forgetting things like numbers and stuff... but forgetting long ingrained and practiced skills. She could knit and crotchet like a lot of people's grandmas, but she was really good at it and fast too. I remember in summer of 2015 before I took her out to my mom's place for the 4th, she was trying to show me, and she just... couldn't do it... like everything about it - the know-how, the muscle memory, everything was just gone... it creeped me out.

Then I remember another night in the beginning of 2016 shortly before home travel nurse care was no longer an option and I had to move her into an Alzheimers care unit; She called me (my number was plastered everywhere in her house with my name) and said Carl and George were making a bunch of noise upstairs... brothers of hers who were at that point dead for years. I remember having to talk her through it. She lived 80 miles away at the time. I had to convince her that I had called them and asked them to go home, then asked her to look out the front window to make sure George's truck was gone (which it was, since it was never there to begin with) and that seemed to calm her down. I have a lot of stories like that. It is a terrible terrible disease. It's not what she ended up dying of though, and for that I am grateful. She was the kind of woman who would have been ashamed to have ultimately lost bodily functions, continence, etc if it had progressed that far.

In any case, very interesting post on the Tau and Ameloid proteins. There is a lot tied to the mouth it seems. I had some dental work done a few years ago, and got a prostate infection shortly after. My primary said he sees that a lot where that bacteria in your mouth that you ingest during dental procedures ends up there or as a UI, etc.

I think Doughboy or Jack once wrote, a clean mouth is a happy mouth....

[Bennyonesix1]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769828/

[baffled]

Sounds like he is a tough man.

Purely by happenstance my wife was walking home from grocery shopping yesterday and saw our good friend’s mom in a park on the way. She stopped to say hi, but the mom—who we’ve known for decades—couldn’t recognize her. She said it was pretty bizarre and chilling.

My dad just did this with my childhood best friend. Buddy's little sister got married a few weeks ago and they were sitting next to each other talking and when my friend walked away, my dad asked my mom who the hell that was.

My dad's still at the point where he seems fine, and then gets perplexed by the simplest things. I'll go to check on him and he'll have Korean TV on, and have no idea how he got there. And for whatever reason, he won't know to change the channel.