Arming for Alzheimer’s A daughter turns her experience of caring for her mother into a survival guide for others.             When Alzheimer’s disease tried to steal her mother away, Florian Raymond fought back the only way she knew how: by giving her mother a doll.”Julie,” her mother called the blue-eyed toy with a porcelain face and golden curls.Julie, her baby.During the three years before her death at 96, Raymond’s mother chatted with Julie, changed her clothes and cradled her at night when she slept.

Coping with the catastrophe of alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s disease has become a household term over the past decade. Nowadays, it seems, everyone knows someone who has Alzheimer’s.The disease, which is marked by progressive loss of memory, affects about 9 percent of Americans over 65. Nationwide, there are some 5 million victims; in New Jersey, there are more than 180,000 people with some form of dementia, the majority of whom have Alzheimer’s.

A hard reality: Advance of Alzheimer’s demands we discard denial.  Alzheimer’s disease offers a particular cruelty to the loved ones of those afflicted by this menacing predator. The people you know and love disappear, slowly losing their faculties, their memories and their personalities while their bodies live on. Alzheimer’s can cause the most committed believers to question their faith. It causes caregivers endless frustration and despair dealing with afflicted loved one. As our population ages, Alzheimer’s will only increase rapidly.

Living with Alzheimer’s,  Not the end of life, but a major change, say Durango couple.  Alzheimer’s disease, a brain disorder that has as many manifestations as the people it afflicts, should be confronted without flinching, according to a retired business executive and part-time resident of Durango who is an Alzheimer’s patient.”It’s not the end of life,” C.J. LaBontÉ, 67, said in an interview last week.

Fundraiser will help ease burden on Alzheimer’s caregivers Alzheimer’s Community Care provides programs and services for Alzheimer’s patients and their families on the Treasure Coast. Help ease the pain of Alzheimer’s caregivers by attending fundraiser Alzheimer’s disease is devastating.

In the United States, 4.5 million people have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease; about 360,000 are diagnosed each year. Officials estimate that by 2050, 14 million Americans will have the disease. In every nation where life expectancy has increased, so has the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.

Home Visits Improve Willingness to Participate in Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials,  A Variety of New Methods May Improve Drug Discovery and Clinical Studies in Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s clinical trials that include home visits could result in shorter recruitment periods and increased patient retention rates, and may save considerable time and expense, according to research reported today at the 2nd Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Prevention of Dementia in Washington, DC. Clinical trials are essential to testing the safety and benefit of promising new treatments for Alzheimer’s.

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE Flood of research sheds new light on brain disorder . As the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease strikes a growing number of elderly Americans, there is one consolation: scientific knowledge of the disease is growing just as rapidly. In the last year or so, researchers have come close to pinpointing a genetic flaw implicated in the disease, uncovered promising new approaches for diagnosis, and begun planning large-scale tests of a drug that might relieve some of the symptoms.

Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias do a number on the mind and body of the individual with the disease and can also take a major toll on the health and finances of the individual’s family. The Alzheimer’s Association’s latest annual report, “2009 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures,” documents the multilevel impact of the disease that 5.3 million Americans are living with today.

HEALTH & FITNESS: alzheimer’s: The long goodbye: The disease that ravaged former President Ronald Reagan affects thousands of people in Collier County – but there is help. Fractured lives,  Early-onset Alzheimer’s steals minds. Alzheimer’s isn’t always a disease of the elderly. One in 10 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease is younger than 65. Some cases have been diagnosed in patients as young as their mid-20s and early 30s. “Because it’s unexpected, it sometimes takes longer to get a diagnosis,” says Susan Toth of Colorado Springs, regional director for the Alzheimer’s Association of Colorado.

Alzheimer’s disease is the fourth-leading cause of death among American adults. It is a progressive, degenerative, irreversible brain disease that affects almost 50 percent of our senior population who are 85 years of age or older. Until recently, Alzheimer’s and other related dementing diseases were relatively unknown. Victims of these brain diseases were obscured by the popular misconception that loss of mental ability is a natural and inevitable aspect of the Alzheimer’s disease.

Driving is one activity that we take for granted because it becomes so commonplace in our lives. However, it is a complex activity that requires quick reaction, clear sensory abilities and split-second decision making. For an Alzheimer’s patient, these abilities may be impaired, even in the early stages of the disease, and the result can be dangerous or deadly. While the Alzheimer’s patient may not recognize the loss of cognitive and sensory skills that impair driving ability

. It’s common for patients in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease to be admitted to a nursing home. However, despite having advanced illness and being very dependent, the natural history of these patients remains unclear.Until recently, there has been no clear consensus on the course of the illness, factors leading to death and quality of life after admittance to a long-term care facility. But new research could help families and caregivers better understand the ailment.

If a grandparent is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, it will have a significant impact on the children in a family. Here are some suggestions to make the best of the situation: + Early on, communicate with your children about their ill grandparent. Children about age 4 and younger probably won’t understand; older than that, however, they will need explanations tailored to their age group.

Shilajit & Withania Somnifera combination has been proven to be extremely beneficial in brain degenerative ailments of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day lowered their risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by between 60 percent and 65 percent later in life,” said lead researcher on the project, Miia Kivipelto, a professor at the University of Kuopio in Finland and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Mind-body techniques may not cure cancer, but they make living with it a whole lot easier Mary Peterson stands in a conference room at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston with her arms stretched above her head. As her instructor intones directions, she visualizes energy pouring into her liver, leans against a wall, then lets out a resounding exhalation. Peterson, who has metastatic breast cancer, receives regular chemotherapy. She and three other women are also taking part in another form of cancer treatment called qigong, an ancient Chinese movement and meditation technique….

IMPROVED RADIATION TECHNOLOGY TARGETS CANCER CELLS MORE PRECISELY Radiation therapy is often used to treat cancer. Radiation works by using packets of energy to destroy the cancer – often by damaging the genetic material of the cancer cell itself, to make it impossible to grow. Over the past decades radiation was established as a highly effective, generally targeted, form of cancer treatment. The higher the radiation dose that could be delivered, the better the size and growth of the tumor could be controlled. Unfortunately, the radiation doses tolerated by a person is very low….

The Miracle Hunter How Elizabeth Corsi turned a drug nobody wanted into a company that could soon gross $500 million–and prolong the lives of cancer patients. For Ernest Lynton, the diagnosis was a death sentence. He had cancer of the pancreas, a disease so lethal that he would be lucky to live six months. Surgery had failed–the tumor was too large–and the usual cocktail of chemotherapy drugs didn’t hold much promise. He might very well have written a will and waited to die. But Lynton was a scientist by training, a retired physicist, and he was intrigued by the notion of using his cancer to advance knowledge.

Helping cancer patients look good and feel better Just because a woman is undergoing treatment for cancer doesn’t mean she has to look like it. Advances in pain, fatigue and anti-nausea medications lesson the side effects of chemotherapy and help a person feel better faster. However, chemotherapy also has side effects that show externally. Hair loss, dry, pale skin and brittle finger nails are all common consequences of chemotherapy. People lose hair because the chemicals used to combat cancer cells also weaken hair follicles

Molecular Revolution A new generation of drugs takes aim at the very heart of cancer–the abnormal genes that make cells malignant in the first place Last week’s miracle-in-mice may have launched a thousand premature hopes, but there’s no doubt in the minds of cancer researchers today that a new era is dawning in the treatment of the U.S.’s No. 2 killer. Three decades ago, the Federal Government’s “War on Cancer” underwrote basic discoveries about the ways broken-down genes lead to malignancies. Now that work is beginning to pay off.

A breast cancer cure or curse?, It is worth exploring simulating pregnancy to avert breast cancer, says ALLAN LANGLANDS, but don’t trade one risk for another, urges LYN SWINBURNE.THERE can surely be no greater geographical contrast than that between Australia and Iceland, yet both rank among the countries with the highest incidence of breast cancer. We also know that when women from low-incidence countries such as our Pacific neighbours (except New Zealand) migrate to Australia, they and their children

The war on cancer, Twenty-five years after the war was declared, new insights are plentiful, but the death toll has mounted Imagine declaring war when you know little about your enemy’s firepower, strategies or tactics. That’s what happened on Jan. 22, 1971, when President Richard Nixon proclaimed war on cancer in his State of the Union address. Many anticipated swift victory, with the taming of the dread disease likened to a moon landing. Even as recently as 1984, the National Cancer Institute’s director predicted that cancer deaths could be halved by the year 2020 \\

Event raises cancer awareness, funds When Paula Naylor was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1984, she never imagined that seven years later she would feel well enough to participate in a 5-kilometer run through LaFortune Park.”There was a period of time when it was just such a shock to think I had cancer. It was so scary,” Naylor, 45, said, recalling the day when she discovered a lump in her breast while showering.”But women can recover from breast cancer – recover to walk and run.

“We Beat Breast Cancer” If there’s one message you can take away from this story, know that breast cancer is not a death sentence. This truth may come as a relief in an age when Black women, although less likely to get breast cancer than their White counterparts, are more likely to die from it when they do. “Finding breast cancer early — before it has spread from the breast — means a 97 percent five-year survival rate,

The Lung cancer poses deadliest threat by far, Cross-sectional scan showing top-to-bottom views of the lungs revealed Sherry Walker’s tiny tumour In the time it takes to read the next few paragraphs, someone will die of lung cancer somewhere in the world.The Global Lung Cancer Coalition says lung cancer consumes one human being every 30 seconds – more than breast and prostate cancer combined, with another 1.2 million new cases diagnosed every year.If everything goes well, Milton resident Sherry Walker, 57, won’t be among the casualties.

For Katie Couric, the fight against cancer is a deeply personal cause: In 1998, the CBS Evening News anchor lost her husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer, and in 2001 her sister Emily died of pancreatic cancer. Long a devoted activist, Couric cofounded the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance (NCCRA) and famously underwent a colonoscopy on the Today show. Recently, she helped develop the idea for Stand Up to Cancer, a star-studded fund-raising special airing Sept. 5 on NBC, CBS and…

Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It Not long ago, I asked a respected cancer researcher if he could send me raw data from a trial he had recently published. He refused. Sharing data would make the study team members “uncomfortable,” he said, as I might use this to “cast doubt” on their results.I’d heard this before: as a statistician who designs and analyzes cancer studies, I regularly ask other researchers to provide additional information or raw data.

The Changing Face Of Breast Cancer Six months ago, Liu Lichun didn’t know her breast could contain cancer. No one had taught the 40-year-old Chinese woman from Inner Mongolia what the disease was. She’d never heard of a mammogram or mastectomy. It had thus never occurred to her that she would lose her left breast to the mysterious illness nor that such a loss would probably save her life. The lump that transformed Liu’s world was not much larger than a marble.

TO a public now accustomed to calls for “a cure for cancer,” it can come as an unpleasant surprise to learn about the complexities of cancer. “Cancer” is not one disease, but a category encompassing many different diseases, and we are more likely to see incremental advances against individual types of cancers than universal cures. But there is also promise in this more nuanced view. The great variety of cancers reflects the fundamental

BREAST CANCER FACTS + Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among American women, behind skin cancer. It is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women, behind lung cancer.+ This year, more than 200,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer, which a woman has a 1-in-8 chance of developing during her lifetime.+ An American woman’s chance of dying of breast cancer is about 1-in-33. About 40,000 American women will die of the disease this year

The decision by an advisory committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to recommend the approval of the drug tamoxifen to prevent cancer shows we are finally learning how to attack the disease before it occurs.This marks a breakthrough in medicine that doctors and researchers have been working on for decades.Women with a high risk, including those with a history of breast cancer in their families.

GOOD HEALTH HEDGING THE BET AGAINST CANCER IN 1981, writer Max Lerner, developed two life-threatening cancers: a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and prostate cancer that had spread to the lungs. He was a vibrantly alive 78-year-old man, but he was not given long to live.I HAD BEEN EXPLORING mindbody health and complementary, or alternative, therapies professionally for 10 years. So I started to study whether any might be of benefit to him, and have now spent another decade studying complementary cancer therapies.

CANCER PREVENTION: CHOICES ARE OURS If we want to prevent most human cancers, we must stop using tobacco and eating high-fat, low-fiber food. That is why there is an increasing emphasis on research programs for cancer prevention, the only truly definitive “cure.”Although there has been a major national effort in cancer treatment research over thepast three or four decades, the gains made against established human cancers are less than was expected.

BREAST CANCER: THE TREND IS AWAY FROM MASTECTOMIES There is good news: A new study indicates that breast-cancer surgery that removes the malignant lump but saves the breast is often as effective as a disfiguring total mastectomy for controlling this major killer of women But there is bad news.Dr. Merrill Feldman, a radiation oncologist at University Hospital in Boston who participated in the study, said, “The bottom line is that breast cancer is predominantly a systemic disease, and that what is done locally (breast surgery).

Nearly 200,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. More than 40,000 of them will die. Approximately 2,000 men will also be similarly diagnosed and more than 20 percent will die. And those are only the statistics reported to the American Cancer Society.Frightening numbers? Yes. And it sometimes seems like a fruitless crusade to stay ahead of the numbers.But if you talk to two women who are battling in the midst of the fray, you’ll find combatants.