“If I needed you, would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain?”
As old-time fiddler Heidi Clare Lambert, artist in residence at UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center, sang these lyrics from Townes Van Zandt, her music filled a Parnassus campus conference room not the typical place to hear such sounds. Read more
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Friday, April 6 2012, that it has approved the use of Amyvid™ (florbetapir) PET scans for patients being evaluated for Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of cognitive impairment. Amyvid is a radiotracer, or a radioactive imaging agent that is injected intravenously at a very small (“trace”) dose. Amyvid PET scans detect the presence of amyloid plaques, one of the core microscopic features of Alzheimer’s disease. A patient with a significant number of amyloid plaques in their brain is likely to have a “positive” Amyvid scan. Read more
Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia may spread within nerve networks in the brain by moving directly between connected neurons, instead of in other ways proposed by scientists, such as by propagating in all directions, according to researchers who report the finding in the March 22 edition of the journal Neuron. Read more