Alzheimer’s beaten?

You can stop worrying about Alzheimer’s Disease. What between Google and my eleven year old daughter, I can find anything. In the mornings when I leave home, there is Little Miss, index finger outstretched, showing me just where I parked the car last night and that I have forgotten my work book. And Google, the patron saint of writers, is always there to remind me of the names I had forgotten. Now all I have to do is get my brain hot-wired into a wireless network and I can meet the world head on with a pocketful of RAM.

You can stop worrying about Alzheimer’s Disease. What between Google and my eleven year old daughter, I can find anything. In the mornings when I leave home, there is Little Miss, index finger outstretched, showing me just where I parked the car last night and that I have forgotten my work book. And Google, the patron saint of writers, is always there to remind me of the names I had forgotten. Now all I have to do is get my brain hot-wired into a wireless network and I can meet the world head on with a pocketful of RAM.However, it turns out that reversing brain degeneration is not all that difficult. We have known for some time that if you don’t use your muscles, they waste away and the skin gets thin. However, we also know that if you use your muscles again, the muscle tissue builds up and becomes strong once more. If you use your hands again, the skin builds up and becomes thicker. The message is simply that all is not lost! Recovery is possible.

However, we were always told that the one organ of the body that could not reverse the degeneration was the Central Nervous System. Once it started to fail, that was it. Dementia was just around the corner. Do not pass go, do not collect 200!

However, that view has recently been challenged and the results are comforting, to say the least. Experiments have been carried out that showed that by inducing stress in an animal resulted in chemicals being released. This on its own was nothing new, but what was new was the fact that some of these chemicals produced a difference in the brain’s anatomy! The idea that the brain could not change was incorrect! It could be ‘short-circuited’ resulting in a new wiring pathways.