Dementia in the News

magine the modern-day reaction to a news story about a man surviving a three-foot, 17-inch, 13½-pound iron bar being blown through his skull - taking a chunk of his brain with it.

Then imagine that this happened in 1848, long before modern medicine and neuroscience. That was the case of Phineas Gage.

Whether the Vermont construction foreman, who was laying railroad track and using explosives at the time of the industrial accident, was lucky or unlucky is a judgment that Warren Anatomical Museum curator Dominic Hall puzzles over to this day.

Imagine you are looking for your wallet on a cluttered desk. As you scan the area, you hold in your mind a mental picture of what your wallet looks like.

MIT neuroscientists have now identified a brain region that stores this type of visual representation during a search. The researchers also found that this region sends signals to the parts of the brain that control eye movements, telling individuals where to look next.

Reisa Sperling, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, shares her family's personal connection with Alzheimer's disease and describes ongoing research into early diagnosis and intervention.

And in this episode's abstract, researchers in the lab of George Church use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to inactivate retroviruses in the pig genome with the hope of one day making organs safer for transplant into humans.


Alzheimer’s researchers have uncovered a surprising clue linked to whether someone is likely to develop the disease later in life. A study published in the latest issue of Science finds that the brains of people at greatest genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s show less activity in a network of neurons that serve as our internal navigation system – known as “grid cells.”

The Gray Wave. The Silver Tsunami. The Agequake.

Aging societies have been on the horizon for decades, not just in the United States but also around the world. The driving forces are well-established: falling fertility rates (by far, the most important factor), longer life expectancy, and the maturing of large cohorts such as the baby boomers in the U.S.

Sheriff Chris Caulk was frightened.

He couldn’t see, at least not well enough to read or orient himself, and his feet ached from the popcorn kernels rattling around inside his socks. The oven mitts on his hands made it hard for him to grasp anything.

Caulk, who patrols in rural Isanti County, Minn., was experiencing something of what it is like to be elderly and suffer from dementia - and he was taken aback by how vulnerable he felt.

“My mind was clear, but my body wouldn’t let me do [things],” Caulk said. “It must be extremely scary.”

Proteins can fold in different ways depending on their environment. These different configurations change the function of the protein; misfolding is frequently associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

They’ve heard the stark facts, that every 67 seconds someone in the United States develops Alzheimer’s disease, that the numbers of Americans with the illness may nearly triple by 2050, that there still is no cure.

But this is what many in the gathering Wednesday at Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to know: What are researchers doing to help the millions of people living with the brain-robbing illness right now? Is anyone paying attention to their intense feelings of isolation, and of being shunned?



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