by Money Control:

Elderly who eat food high in carbohydrates and sugar have nearly four times the risk of developing dementia, a new study has claimed. Mayo Clinic researchers found that those aged 70 plus who consume a lot of protein and fat relative to carbohydrates are less likely to become cognitively impaired.

“We think it’s important that you eat a healthy balance of protein, carbohydrates and fat, because each of these nutrients has an important role in the body,” lead author Rosebud Roberts said. Researchers tracked 1,230 people ages 70 to 89 who provided information on what they ate during the previous year.

by Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation:

People with diabetes lack the ability to make or use insulin, a hormone that helps the body to maintain healthy levels of glucose, or blood sugar. Now researchers have found that problems using insulin in the brain may contribute to the memory problems of Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings add to a growing body of research linking diabetes with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Better understanding of the link between diabetes and Alzheimer’s could lead to better treatments for the devastating disease, the researchers say.

The researchers, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, found abnormalities in the way people with Alzheimer’s process insulin in the brain.

by Serena Gordon for HealthDay:

Treatment with growth hormone-releasing hormone improves memory and focus in healthy adults and in those who already show some signs of mental decline, new research finds.

“Growth hormone-releasing hormone doesn’t target one specific area in the body and brain,” said study lead author Laura Baker, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle. “It stimulates a whole cascade of hormones in the body and brain; it stimulates normal function of a system that was working at a younger age so that cells can do what they were programmed to do at birth.”

Results of the study are published in the Aug. 6 issue of theArchives of Neurology.

As levels of growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) decrease with age, so too do other hormones stimulated by GHRH, such as growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor 1. All of these hormones are believed to play a role in brain health, and decreasing levels of these hormones are suspected to play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

by BBC News:

t has been known for some time that people with diabetes have a much higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s, but not why this is so.

Now US researchers writing in Genetics say a study of worms has indicated a known Alzheimer’s gene also plays a role in the way insulin is processed.

Dementia experts said more work in humans was now needed.

Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia, which affects 820,000 people in the UK. There are medications which can slow the progress of the disease, but none that can halt its progress.

A key indication of Alzheimer’s, which can only be seen after death, is the presence of sticky plaques of amyloid protein in decimated portions of patients’ brains. Scientists have already found mutations in a gene involved in the processing of amyloid protein in Alzheimer’s which run in families.

by Stacey Burling for Philly.com

Several large studies have shown that people with diabetes are at especially high risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

Steven Arnold, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Memory Center, said diabetics are 50 to 100 percent more likely to get the fatal, memory-destroying disease. This has made researchers increasingly interested in the role that insulin, the hormone that’s out of whack in diabetes, might play in Alzheimer’s.

In the brain, Arnold said, insulin is important for cell growth and releasing neurotransmitters that allow cells to communicate. It enhances learning and memory.

Arnold is the senior author of a new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that looked at the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor to dementia. He found insulin resistance in their brains, even though the people did not have diabetes. Arnold said the chemical differences between those who did and did not have memory problems were striking. “I’ve never seen a difference this large,” he said.

by David DiSalvo for Forbes

Overeating, poor memory formation, learning disorders, depression  – all have been linked in recent research to the over-consumption of sugar. And these linkages point to a problem that is only beginning to be better understood: what our chronic intake of added sugar is doing to our brains.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),  the average American consumes 156 pounds of added sugar per year. That’s five grocery store shelves loaded with 30 or so one pound bags of sugar each.  If you find that hard to believe, that’s probably because sugar is so ubiquitous in our diets that most of us have no idea how much we’re consuming.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) puts the amount at 27.5 teaspoons of sugar a day per capita, which translates to 440 calories  – nearly one quarter of a typical 2000 calorie a day diet.

The key word in all of the stats is “added.”  While a healthy diet would contain a significant amount of naturally occurring sugar (in fruits and grains, for example), the problem is that we’re chronically consuming much more added sugar in processed foods.

by Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation

An intriguing early report found that a squirt of insulin deep into the nose helped ease the symptoms of early Alzheimer’s disease. But the results, though promising, are preliminary, and more studies are needed to determine if the novel treatment might be an effective new dementia treatment.

The nasal drug, which people with diabetes commonly use as an injection to help keep blood sugar levels under control, also helped people with mild cognitive impairment, a form of memory loss that may lead to full-blown Alzheimer’s.

In the study, the insulin was given in an aerosol form through a special device that delivered a spray deep into the nasal passages. The nose was chosen as a route of delivery of the insulin because it is known that many substances can be transported directly to the brain by passing along the olfactory nerve.

by Newsroom America

An emerging body of research suggests that Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to insulin resistance, constituting a third type of diabetes.

This model is based on several observations including an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease for diabetic patients, and reduced insulin levels in the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s disease patients.

Though intriguing, the existing evidence does not reveal if defective insulin signaling is causative of Alzheimer’s or how insulin resistance impacts cognitive function.

Two back-to-back research articles in the Journal of Clinical Investigation – led by Konrad Talbot, Steve Arnold and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and by Fernanda De Felice, Sergio Ferreria and colleagues at the University of Rio de Janeiro – address the connection between insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease.

The University of Pennsylvania team examined insulin signaling in human brain tissue postmortem, and concluded that the activation state of many insulin signaling molecules were highly related to memory and cognitive function.

They further suggest that insulin resistance is a common and early feature of Alzheimer’s disease.

by Brian Shilhavy for Health Impact News Daily

The news about how effective coconut oil is in treating Alzheimer’s Disease is spreading fast, as news about the failure of drugs in treating Alzheimer’s continues to make headlines here in 2012.

Just this month, drug companies Pfizer and Medivation admitted that the new drug they were developing for Alzheimer’s, dimebon, not only did not help patients in trials, but made patients worse. The expensive drug had already reached phase III trials. So as the development of this drug has now been abandoned, and so many other potential drugs have also failed, many are beginning to look at the role of diet in Alzheimer’s and focusing on prevention.

People are also beginning to see positive results in using coconut oil to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s.

by First-Signs-of-Diabetes-Symptoms.com

Type 3 Diabetes is a new form of diabetes discovered by Dr Suzanne de la Monte and her research team at the US Brown Medical School. In the research it was found that the brain produces insulin. Yes, the brain really produces insulin. This brain insulin is not affected by the level of glucose in the blood as in type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes.

However with type3 diabetes the brain produces lower than normal levels of brain insulin. If the brain cells are deprived of insulin they eventually die causing memory loss and other degenerative diseases.

This new type of diabetes also strengthens scientists’ belief that people with diabetes have an increased risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease by up to 65%. Alzheimer is a degenerative brain disorder.