Cognitive Labs

When it comes to optimizing cognitive performance, one species dines almost exclusively from an A-List menu.

That species is the Ursis (add your descriptor, e.g., borealis)or Bear.

Here in the US, they eat salmon, berries, other sea carrion, and large quantities of moths and butterflies when available, in addition to certain roots and herbs.

Bears of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest in particular eat well, with a diet of salmon and steelhead, along with plentiful berries.

Berries are powerful antioxidants; the wild fish is a potent source of the valuable omega-3 oil. While you might want to avoid the washed up orca, beluga, or seal, all of the other items are healthful - not sure about the moths and butterflies though.

You never know what you will find in the "science" news. At the University of Arkansas, researchers say they have created a way to power a vehicle using chicken fat. "A chicken in every pot (garage), and a car in every garage." Maybe this statement can be reduced to one sentence.

In other news, the first evidence came of a pocket-sized solar system, with miniature planets orbiting a smoldering brown dwarf 500 light years away in the constellation Lacerta (The chamaeleon). Lacerta is one of those faint groupings what you can't see from any urban or suburban area because of the light pollution. You'll have to be far out in the country or in the desert or mountains.

This is mainly interesting because most solar system groups identified so far have involved titanic stars and planets. We have a picture of the solar system, courtesy of a NASA rendering. Try the new solar system puzzle

Try the Puzzle


One of the interesting characters of the West was Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. His self-appointed reign from San Francisco began in 1859 with this proclamation.

At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself the Emperor of These United States.



During his reign, Emperor Norton abolished Congress, removed the governor
of Virginia, dissolved the Republic, fired Abraham Lincoln, and
banned the word "Frisco" - among his many declarations.

view this post as a web page on cognitivelabs.com

Latest News on Cognitive Ability

source: Cognitive Labs newswire

Ann Todd was shocked when she first realized something was wrong with her husband, Ronald.

"He called the sheriff's office to report that some of his tools had been stolen," she said. "And when I came home from work he told me about it. I realized he had forgotten that he had given them to our son."

That day marked the beginning of the Monterey couple's nine-year struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Ronald died last year.

Like many Alzheimer's patients, Ronald Todd had high cholesterol. But the side effects of the cholesterol-lowering drug he was taking forced him to quit the medication.

Since then, Ann Todd, a registered nurse, said she has read about studies that found similar drugs might actually slow the progression of the disease.

"That's hopeful," she said. continued

---------------------------------------
Brain Health is important. Preventative activities can help using the Cognitive Labs tests and games, plus social interaction.
We invite you to try out the new THINKING SPEED TEST available from the http://cognitivelabs.com home page in honor of Alzheimer's Awareness month.
Already, thousands of people have taken this test (in 2 weeks time). Also, many people have clicked through to the Alzheimer's Association locator and found their nearest Association
location.

Over time, opinions change, a pattern evolves.

Our foray into vitamin and supplement research is pretty interesting. While in the early days of our survey on vitamin consumption, "C" took the lead, in recent days multi-vitamins captured the momentum and now leads by a significant margin...as your favorite vitamin.

What does it mean?

You want value in your choice of supplement. You want to cover your bases by taking all of the essential elements necessary for vitality and 100% health.

>>check back for more insights, including - how "gamers" view supplements. Are they worthwhile? Can they give you an "edge?"

Do you remember the Saturn V rocket? The first stage of this rocket ran entirely on kerosene fuel, the 2nd stage on liquid oxygen.

This new puzzle lets you sort and then solve the puzzle, exercising your brain while letting you reminisce over the amazing accomplishments of this group of dedicated people, who built the Space Age. IE only. Hope everyone had a thankful Thanksgiving holiday.

Use Cogsearch for all your Internet search needs. It's free.

The brainy, cognitively unchallenged people at Google have annexed an interesting new province to their advertising Empire.

Advertisers will now be able to directly bid on sites where they want their ads to run. This incorporates some of the features of firms like blogads and pud's adbrite. In another life, we once pitched pud on an idea to run a pud-powered internet radio station to join some of our channels, like the still-smoking digitally imported aka di.fm now an excellent digital experience with multiple channels, then a shoutcast/live 365 station. This would have been one of the 1st pudcasts; mind you, this was when the website was just getting noticed.

We had a meeting at pud's silicon alley live/work place with a drumkit, ate some old pizza and drank warm Coke. Then it was hasta la vista.
The burn rate bonfire continued, and as we were wont to do, added more casualties to our daily list of dead streaming audio and video companies from our stylishly spartan, proto-industrial south of market digs, pud's rise to new media notoriety, like the emergence of the mammal, was inversely porportional to the mass extinction on the Internet.

So, if you would like to advertise on cognitivelabs.com, now you can easily do so by scanning the Ads on our site and clicking on the link when prompted. Thanks. This post brought to you by Google On-site advertiser sign-up.

Source: Cognitive Labs NewsWire

New Study Finds Additional Evidence that Statin Drugs May Help Slow Mental Decline in the Elderly. Neurology Reports that a new study recently completed shows that statin drugs can be effective in reducing the impact of cognitive decline. The study was completed on a compound being developed by Nymox (NASDAQ: NYMX)

Researchers in the Cardiovascular Health Study Collaborative Research Group monitored the cognitive abilities of 3,334 people over the age of 65 without dementia for an average of seven years and found that regular statin use was associated with a rate of cognitive decline less than half of that of untreated patients.

These new results published in Neurology (the official scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology) follow on other positive results concerning Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and statin drugs which were released last week. In the first study, statins were found to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a new three year study of 342 AD patients (J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 2005; 76:1624-1629). Researchers in France compared AD patients taking cholesterol-lowering medication including statins to AD patients with unmedicated high cholesterol levels and to AD patients with normal cholesterol. They found that the use of cholesterol-lowering medication significantly slowed the cognitive decline that is the hallmark of AD as compared to both the unmedicated high cholesterol group and the normal cholesterol group.

Statins are a class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that are the biggest-selling prescription pills in pharmaceutical history with estimated 2004 global sales of up to $26 billion. Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia in the elderly, afflicting an estimated 4.5 million people in the U.S. alone.

A new study from the ANA makes the case that early onset dementia can be attributable to factors such as alcohol consumption, head injuries, and other illnesses. Prevention is key. In recent years, sports teams and coaches have taken a greater interest in monitoring and treating head injuries such as concussions, often using cognitive software batteries as part of the monitoring regimen. Similar programs have been used for returning veterans from Iraq who have received head injuries.

-------
Patients who develop dementia before age 65 years have more preventable conditions—including cognitive deficits and impaired functioning related to alcohol abuse, head trauma, and HIV—compared with patients with late-onset dementia, according to the largest series to date on early-onset dementia.

The study, presented here at the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association (ANA), showed alcohol abuse accounted for 5% of cases of early-onset dementia (dementia that strikes before age 65) versus 3% of late-onset dementia. Traumatic brain injury accounted for 24% of early-onset dementia versus 4% of late-onset dementia.

HIV accounted for 8% of early-onset dementia versus 3% of late-onset dementia. A group of rare brain disorders that affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, which control speech and personality, accounted for 3% of cases of early-onset dementia versus less than 1% of late-onset dementia.

All the differences reached statistical significance, said Dr. Aaron McMurtray, a neurobehavioural fellow in the department of neurology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Late-onset mostly due to Alzheimer's

In contrast, Alzheimer's disease accounted for 52% of cases of late-onset dementia, compared with just 17% of cases of early-onset dementia, he said.

The study, which was awarded an ANA fellowship travel award, was designed to investigate the frequency and causes of early-onset dementia versus late-onset dementia at a U.S. Veterans Affairs memory program over a four-year period, he said.

Dementia was diagnosed if patients had deficits in two or more domains of cognition sufficient to cause impairment in social or occupational functioning and representing a significant decline from a previous level of functioning.

Of the 1,683 patients who were evaluated, 948 (56.3%) met criteria for dementia. Of these, 278 (29.3%) developed dementia before age 65 years, at a mean age of 51.5 years, and 670 (70.7%) had an age of onset of 65 years or older.

Dr. Lawrence Honig (PhD), associate professor of clinical neurology in the division of dementia and aging at Columbia University in New York, said the findings confirm what is generally seen in clinical practice.

"While it is very much dependent on who refers your patient, overall we see much more Alzheimer's disease in older patients and dementia due to preventable causes such as TBI (traumatic brain injury) and alcohol abuse in younger patients," he said.

Dr. McMurtray said while the researchers were expecting Alzheimer's disease to be less prevalent in younger persons, they were surprised at their high rates of dementia due to alcohol abuse, traumatic brain injury and HIV.

The findings will be even more important as new treatments for brain injury, alcohol abuse and other causes of early-onset dementia are developed, he said.

Everybody remembers air hockey - it came out in the 1970's. A plastic puck hovers over a cushion of cool air jets that can cool your hand on a hot day. Colliding with the handheld "stick," the puck zips back and forth until someone is just a little slow...

Well, now there is unlimited Air Hockey play on Game Central! Play Now, don't forget to register.

I thought this would be interesting since Roesner House is very local and something friends and family are involved in helping, such as my daughters' school class. You can see why we are rolling out all the memory picture puzzles, in addition to all the games and tests. Don't forget the quick memory test we offer!


Seniors given memory jog at Roesner House
By Joan Aragone, CORRESPONDENT, San Mateo County Times


REMEMBER WHEN keeping a scrapbook meant going to the dime store, buying a photo album or other book with blank pages, and saving dance invitations, photos, birthday cards, menus, ticket stubs and other stuff?

You used sticky white paste or bottles of glue and decorated the pages with colored paper, ribbon or your own drawings. When that book got full, you bought another and started all over again. Every kid I knew had a scrapbook, and years later, most of those now-adult kids can find their old creations in a trunk somewhere.

Well, for anyone who didn't know already, making scrapbooks has become an industry. It's called "scrapbooking," with guidelines, stores that sell special supplies, conferences, associations and magazines that keep "scrapbookers" up to date on trends.

Whichever way you do it, making scrapbooks and using memorabilia, mental health professionals have found, is an important way to stimulate memories of the past in brains affected by Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. Who knew, when you were 10 years old, that photos of your neighborhood and the notes you passed in English class would serve to stimulate the aging brain?

For the families and friends of the approximately 4.5 million Americans — including 500,000 Californians older than 60 — diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or a related disorder, such activities are vital.

Gradual loss of memory is a prime symptom of Alzheimer's, a progressive brain disease characterized in the early stages by loss of short-term memory. With time, increasingly greater areas of memory fade.

But facilities that serve Alzheimer's patients and families affected by the disease treat Alzheimer's with memory-jogging activities.

"People with Alzheimer's disease often don't initiate activities or conversation on their own. Making scrapbooks draws them out," said Daniel Kuhn, author of "Alzheimer's Early Stages: First Steps for Family, Friends and Caregivers," (Hunter House Publishers, 2003).

In a program called "Past and Presence" at Peninsula Volunteers' Roesner House Adult Day Care Center in Menlo Park, Alzheimer's patients make photo collages.

Working in groups with facilitators over an eight-week period, patients plan their individual collage, lay it out and add their own comments. The program has been in operation for three years.

"It's been very successful," said Barbara Kalt, director of Roesner House. "Families provide old and some new photos, we take new photos, and the patient makes a collage. Some have severe memory loss, and the photos spark good memories.

"The collage is a wonderful thing for families to have. We also encourage family members to bring out the photo album and to do scrapbooking activities at home."

More than seven out of 10 people with Alzheimer's disease live at home, where family and friends provide almost 75 percent of their care, according to the Alzheimer's
Association. With access to photos, letters and other memorabilia, families can tackle scrapbooking at home. And, experts say, everybody benefits.
"Scrapbooking stimulates impaired memories. The photos and clippings serve as prompts for early memories and a chance to talk about the past. It's a time for both parties to learn," Kuhn said.

The activity is done together by patient and family members or friends.

"It's an opportunity for interaction and conversation. It also helps other generations understand the Alzheimer's patient, as it involves the children and the grandkids," he said. "And it can be ongoing, something that can last for day, weeks or years."

A new program that offers instructions on making a scrapbook and a free scrapbooking kit to families of Alzheimer's patients is available after registration on http://www.memoriestotreasure.com. The program is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies Esai Inc. and Pfizer Inc, with the National Alliance for Caregiving, and Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Magazine.

Picture memory albums - those are on the way...in addition to more picture puzzles.Stay tuned. We'll also be releasing a new game tonite.

At Game Central, our newest game is SpaceEscape, which has a "how fast are you?" mode where you can try accelerating a spaceship over and over getting your time down under 5 seconds...This combines reaction time with visual perception...as, if you don't watch out, you can crash easily.

Question:

DO people really want to track their cognitive performance? Like their Amazon purchase?

Hypothesis:
Probably, maybe 67% do. It's not a question that we ever asked with a test.

Testing the Hypothesis:

92.7% of people registering for the quick thinking speed test have checked YES, track my score.

Implications:

Think about it. Greater cognitive awareness means more self-awareness and earlier detection of any issues. A world where better cognitive performance is the norm. Humanity then can advance to loftier goals, like increasing lifespan.

Hal would approve


Thanks for taking the new thinking speed test (see on cognitivelabs.com). It was not until Monday that it got started - hey, it didn't work in Mozilla/Firefox! - but I fixed that. We're already closing in on about 1,000 new members through that quick test in 48 hours.

Thanks very much. Meanwhile we put out a newsletter yesterday which we have been staggering through the alphabet - and a GameCentral Newsletter.

Let me know if you did not receive it. GameCentral News right now is going to those of you who signed up for GameCentral - you'll get the first head's up on "best of the web" games that we publish. GameCentral has about 7,000 members in the past 2.5 weeks.

Meanwhile

The Babe was a good pitcher before he was known as a hitter. The source of his uncommon strength, unbeknownst to many - was his favorite food - pickled eels served with chocolate ice cream.


Try the Babe Memory Puzzle Now. We also have the Yankees Puzzle. No George Steinbrenner puzzle, yet. Or, click through to the 'real' champions this year - The Chicago White Sox

The mystery of Hollywood. Understanding the Byzantine ways of this unique culture is a challenge in itself. If you can't figure it out, neither can we.





However, click on the puzzle above, and when you get to the expanded Hollywood sign page (which is one of the pages that had a makeover) see if you can unscramble the mystery and bring clarity to the situation...See ya later

Go to our site



This month is National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness month in the United States. I am happy to say that in cooperation with the Alzheimer's Association, we are offering a quick free test that visitors to our site can take.

After you complete the test, you will decide if you want to track your score or not. The benefit of tracking your score, like tracking something you bought at Amazon.com or EBay, is that our system will keep track of it over time. In this particular series of pages, this is voluntary. We have also used our simplest test - which measures reaction time - or, how fast your brain processes information. It's like measuring the number of ohms in a circuit (for you electricians or electrical engineers) and the level of impedance -but it applies to your brain.

Why is it important? A number of researchers (at least 3 major studies have been announced in the past 12 months or so) have included reaction time measurements in studies of either longevity or dementia. While it is true that many factors can affect reaction times, and also many physical conditions (not just Alzheimer's) it's also true that slow reaction times can signal a lack of attentiveness, and therefore potential warning signs of early cognitive impairment. If you have further questions, it's a good idea to talk to the Alzheimer's Association or see your physician, who can recommend a variety of personalized tests and inteviews as next steps.

Hope you have tried a few puzzle exercises by now.

Here is a mosaic puzzle from the church in Ravenna, Italy. I have always been impressed by the bright colors and delicacy of the work, demanding countless hours doubtless. Ravenna on the Adriatic coast was for many years the capital of the western part of the Roman Empire in later times since it could be defended more easily than Rome as it had a strong natural harbor and also was circumvented by marshes (Rome had already been sacked by the Goths in 410 AD). It was the Byzantine capital in the West commanded by an exarch (Greek: exarchos) or civil and military commander. Eventually it fell into the hands of the Lombards longobards: the long-beards, a Germanic tribe of alleged Swedish descent from which the appellation Lombardy came. Anyway, here is the puzzle. See how quickly you can put it back together. Hit "scramble" to make the script re-organize the picture (it'll look a little like Flickr).






If you're stumped, hit Solve, and it will fly back together!

Guess What?




Some of the well-known historical figures populating our memory puzzle pages are getting facelifts.

That's right - they are getting bigger, and more easy to see. This, thanks to your feedback about using small pictures and making them EASIER TO SEE - Good point. They loaded faster, but they are also hard to see. So we have remedied that. They are not all done yet - but take a look at Robert E Lee, Virginia's favorite son - Ulysses Grant, and going back far in time - King Tut. In a tribute to the historian Edward Gibbon, we will have a puzzle for every single Roman ruler, stretching from 40 B.C. to 1453 A.D. - the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

Do you want to participate in a study?

If you live in the Bay Area and fit the age parameters you can sign up here and we will share the information with the researchers who are doing the study.

This is a fascinating study, showing that attention is critical to the early stages of impairment...complex reaction time, such as Cognitive Labs measures is one of the surest-known ways of measuring attentiveness and focus...

Here's more from the article which appeared in NeuroPsychology.People in early stages of Alzheimer's disease have greater difficulty shifting attention back and forth between competing sources of information, a finding that offers new support for theories that contend breakdowns in attention play an important role in the onset of the disease.

"Our results provide evidence that breakdowns in attention produce a clear change in the early stages of Alzheimer's-related dementia," said study co-author David A. Balota, a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Published in a recent issue of the journal Neuropsychology, the study suggests that subtle breakdowns in attention may offer a reliable clue that a patient is grappling with early symptoms of Alzheimer's-related dementia.

The findings are important because they offer clinicians and researchers another tool by which to better predict and understand dementia of the Alzheimer's type early in its history. Psychologists focus on early detection in part because current medications are useful only when given very early in the course of the disease.

While it's well known that memory skills deteriorate as Alzheimer's progresses, recent research by Balota and Duchek, among others, have championed the notion that breakdowns in attention may be at the heart of many cognitive problems linked to Alzheimer's. Although memory problems also show up in early stages of the disease, this study suggests that underlying declines in attention may be contributing to these memory mishaps and to other cognitive difficulties often associated with the disease.

"Because attention is prerequisite for memory, one might suspect that attention is one of the contributing culprits, at least early on in the disease," suggests study lead author Janet M. Duchek, an associate professor of psychology.

Participants for the study were drawn from volunteers at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University. Duchek and Balota studied 94 older participants, average age mid-70s, who were healthy control individuals or individuals diagnosed with very mild, or mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type.

In an effort to gauge each group's ability to effectively monitor and switch among competing channels of information, Duchek and Balota relied on a well-established psychological testing technique know as the dichotic listening task.

The Dichotomy

Developed in the 1950s, the dichotic listening test plays off the fact that humans are hardwired to process sensory information in a cross-lateral fashion - words heard in the left ear tend to be processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, and vice-versa. Since the left hemisphere of the brain is typically dominant for language processing, words presented in the right ear often have an advantage over words presented simultaneously in the left ear -- the right ear-left hemisphere processing channel is said to be "pre-potent" in that it has a default processing advantage over the left ear-right hemisphere channel.

Using the dichotic listening task, Duchek and Balota presented participants with distinct streams of audio information via headphones. One stream of information -- computer-generated speech naming three digits (such as 4, 3, 1) -- went to the left ear; a different stream (such as 9, 2, 5) went to the right ear.

By asking participants to recall numbers in the order they were presented to either ear, the researchers were able to measure an individual's ability to switch back and forth between right-left processing channels, and more importantly, to monitor how well attention skills allowed them to overcome the "pre-potent" tendency to favor information presented to the default right ear-left hemisphere language channel.

read more about the study

My website traffic today (according to Alexa) is higher than Third Age Media's, a company that survived the crash and kept going. I once took a plane ride with one of the investors in 3rd Age from the Phoenix area; they had raised something like $60 million (this was in 1999) I wonder how much since?

Our goal is to be number one. Ok, that's a little tough to reach - but as significant as possible. Onward Ho!

I met a traveler from an antique land... this is Ozymandias but this statue was not the one Shelley was referring to in the poem, that one is in Thebes.

Try this one out (beta) on Internet Explorer. We are working on our photo puzzles and of course, will allow you to do something wonderful with yours. By all means send us your favorites at think@cognitivezlabs.com for now.

The lone and level sands stretch far away

Andrea Sachs at the Washington Post writes a very interesting piece on the evolution of the Google-driven recipe.

This takes culinary discovery and honorable repaste to a new level, with the search engine functioning like an uber-cookbook. As she writes, according to Media Metrix there were 33 million searches for food-and cooking.

For us, this leads to the creation of a new area: cognitive nutrition. What we eat impacts how we think and possibly how long we live. Is there a way to not just enjoy but also archive cognitive pleasing recipes?

Now that longevity has increased for both sexes, but especially for women, it turns out that one of the predictive factors for dementia is a pre-diagnosis measurement of low testosterone levels......

The Medical Reporter, Australia, offers the following information.
Women are living longer than in the past, but at a cost.

Women are experiencing greater loss of years of healthy life, with dementia now the fourth most important cause of disability-adjusted years of life lost among women in Western countries.

It is expected to be the leading cause of disability by the year 2016, according to a speaker at the annual conference of the Australian Menopause Society.

Dr. Susan Davis, from Monash University's department of medicine in Victoria, told the conference that women have a greater rate of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline than men.

True gender gap

One theory points to the fact that there are more older women than older men.

But this is not the case, she said, as there appears to be a true gender discrepancy, such that women are more vulnerable to developing Alzheimer's than men.

"In vitro and in vivo research findings provide biological plausibility that the hypo-estrogenic state adversely affects neurological tissues.

"The widespread distribution of intracellular estrogen receptors alpha and beta throughout many regions of the brain has been confirmed using increasingly precise and sensitive localization techniques.

"And in vitro studies have shown that estrogen directly influences neuronal growth and neurochemical systems that change with age-related cognitive decline."

Although hormone therapy has gone out of favour since the Women's Health Initiative study, more recent data, including from Dr. Davis's research, suggest that one factor may be changes in hormones through midlife that put women at greater risk.

Intervene early

"There is still a hypothesis that soon after the menopausal transition, the drop in estrogen has a critical effect, and if you intervene then, you reduce the risk of cognitive decline later.

"However, if you intervene later with estrogen, it will be a bad thing."

Dr. Davis is also studying the effect of androgens on Alzheimer's disease.

A recent study looked at men with Alzheimer's and testosterone levels in the brain, she said.

Men who die of Alzheimer's have much lower testosterone levels in their brain than do men who die of other causes.

"There is a continuum: Men with no Alzheimer's have much higher testosterone levels in their brain than men with non-cognitive decline, and the lowest is in men with Alzheimer's. So there is a gradient.

"We did a small study of 60 women recently where we showed that testosterone replacement was associated with beneficial effects on cognition in women."

She plans to repeat this work in a much larger, placebo-controlled trial.

"Clinically, many of my patients stay on testosterone because they say they think better. This could have massive implications for the treatment of women, because Alzheimer's is going to be the leading cause of disability in aged women in the future, with a huge cost burden to the community."

Testosterone benefits

In another study, Dr. Davis and colleagues are examining the effects of giving testosterone to women, since testosterone is the building block for estrogen.

Of 60 women who were already on hormone replacement therapy, half were given an aromatase inhibitor drug, which totally blocks the conversion of testosterone to estrogen, and half were given a placebo.

"We were interested to see whether that blocking also resulted in blocking the effects of testosterone but, in fact, it did not."

Women had significant improvements in certain domains of cognition and this was unaffected by the blocking of testosterone conversion to estrogen, she said.

"So these effects are clearly testosterone effects.

"We also looked at sexual function and found it improved in all women very significantly, but there was no effect if we blocked testosterone conversion to estrogen."

The beta amyloid blaster (http://cognitivelabs.com/betaamyloid_blaster.htm)is definitely new and improved, so give it a try.

What is amyloid plaque?

Here is a definition, according to Wikipedia:

Amyloid describes various types of protein aggregations that share specific traits when examined microscopically. The name amyloid comes from the early mistaken identification of the substance as starch (amylum in Latin), based on crude iodine-staining techniques. For a period the scientific community debated whether or not amyloid deposits were fatty deposits or carbohydrate deposits until it was finally resolved that it was neither, rather a deposition of proteinaceous mass.

The phenotypes of genetically transmitted amyloid diseases are often inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion. Sometimes, the difference between aggressive amyloid diseases and senescent amyloid diseases is due to a mutation which makes the protein more prone to aggregation. Most commonly seen are point mutations which affect the cohesiveness of the protein and promote misfolding; other mutations cause aggregation-prone pieces of the protein to be cleaved off from the rest of the protein.

Now what can you do about it? You can play the amyloid plaque game and launch imaginary torpedoes at the plaque formations as they whiz by....

Have fun. If you noticed, when you leave this page you see some interesting pictures from the year....(?) the year 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' was released, also witnessing the introduction of the Commodore Vic 20 and the IBM PC, and only a year or so after Microsoft licensed DOS from a little company, then re-licensed it to IBM....Tell me the year!

Testing 1,2,3...

I have been sending this out via email to everyone....it was a good weekend, with 965 new members...also picked up a copy of LucasArts' SW Battlefront 2.

Best,

MA

Hello. You are receiving this because you took a memory test recently. Regularly, Cognitive Labs will contact you to let you know what's going on.
We're adding games and tests to check and enhance everyone's cognitive ability. Expect to hear more from us in the near future.

We've added two new areas to our site: Game Central at http://games.cognitivelabs.com and we have expanded the discussion of Alzheimer's at http://cognitivelabs.com/alzheimers.htm
You can also take a fun reaction time test right at http://cognitivelabs.com called BrainPal - it's at the bottom of the page.

We have a new program called gamer-IQ, for people who like fun casual games and puzzles, or who are new to online games but want to learn more. There is more to it than that
but you can see more on the site.

What else is new? I invite you to come to http://www.cognitivelabs.com and see. A quick way to get the latest news is to add one of our RSS feeds to your reader or MyYahoo!

news on memory loss: http://cognitivelabs.com/atom.xml
-Add it to MyYahoo! by clicking:http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://cognitivelabs.com/atom.xml
news on gamer-IQ and scientific gaming: http://cognitivelabs.com/gameriq/atom.xml
-Add it to MyYahoo! by clicking: http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/cstore?.opt=content&.url=http%3a//cognitivelabs.com/gameriq/atom.xml&.page=p1

Also, don't forget to check out gamer-IQ http://gameriq.cognitivelabs.com - you can help in the design of this area and also tell as many of your friends as you want.

More later, so please stay tuned.

Thanks,

Michael Addicott
http://cognitivelabs.com

This is where to find the gamerIQ RSS feed:

http://cognitivelabs.com/gameriq/atom.xml

(It just changed!!!)

Also, the MemCheck Memory News feed has changed:

http://cognitivelabs.com/atom.xml (please make a note of it)

Researchers this week have found that the herbal substance Peyote which comes from the desert areas of Texas and northern Mexico - is not harmful to cognitive ability. In fact, the study shows that peyote users performed better on cognitive tests than individuals who consume alcohol.

Peyote is used by Native Americans in their natural rites. You might want to read the Wired article by Randy Dotinga.

Climbing the pinnacle for memory loss:


Kilimanjaro climb for Alzheimer's. A woman in Canada raised over $19,000 for Alzheimers Research by completing a strenuous climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I just got a nice testimonial and a five-star ranking on


Cogsearch from Gene who lives in Indiana. (above)

Cogsearch saves you time when looking for anything related to cognition with its "power links" one level closer to the answer you are looking for than the standard Google search interface. If you like it, please use if for all your searches. Bookmark it even.

Content from the Journal of Neurology


Is This You? Early Signal of Alzheimer's

When older people experience an unexplained weight loss, it could be an early signal of Alzheimer's disease, the Associated Press reports of research from Chicago's Rush University Medical Center. The weight loss, which tends to be gradual and not dramatic, typically occurs years before memory lapses happen.

This fascinating new theory is based on an ongoing study of 820 Roman Catholic priests, nuns and brothers with an average age of 75. At the start of the study, the average BMI of the participants, none of whom had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, was 27.4, which is considered overweight. During the 10-year study period, 151 of the 820 volunteers developed the disease. Those whose BMI dropped one point each year had a 35 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer's later, compared with those whose BMI remained the same.

Why is weight loss an early symptom of Alzheimer's? It appears the disease first attacks brain regions that are involved in regulating food intake and metabolism, says study co-author Dr. David Bennett, who is the director of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center. While weight loss frequently occurs after an Alzheimer's diagnosis, this has been blamed largely on memory lapses and lifestyle changes. Now Bennett thinks brain changes that begin well before the diagnosis could also be the reason.

Dr. Peter Rabins, an Alzheimer's researcher and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told AP this new research confirms what many doctors now believe: that the abnormalities of Alzheimer's "really are present for at least 10 years before there are any symptoms. The idea that something would start before it became clinically obvious no longer seems that farfetched," Rabins explained.

Still, the early weight loss could be due to behavior changes, such as loss of initiative, instead of brain changes affecting metabolism. The problem is that the weight loss is subtle so it's not necessarily recognized until after the Alzheimer's diagnosis is made.

The study findings were reported in the journal Neurology.

Build the global memory archive.

We have a dream.

One day, we will know much more about memory loss through observation of enough people to understand the patterns in the data.

When we combine this with efforts of researchers to identify and combat the mechanisms causing memory decline, we will know much more effectively how to proceed.

Won't you help us in this effort?

You can get started right now, all we need is more time and effort.