8th August: Remembering Reverend John, Annabel, Lynn, Sophia and others who died from very severe ME

8th August Severe #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis Understanding and Remembrance Day

Nice explanation of PACE trial nonsense and Wessely psychiatry

Nice explanation of PACEtrial nonsense and Wessely psychiatry by @dwbarlow: "If the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail"

Brian Nicholson sectioned again

August 24, 2012: Anonymous said...

Serious situation I just wanted evrybody to know Brian Nicholson was sectioned again in London for being deluded and hypochondriac with ME about his health. He is being given clopixol injections he is in a bad way.

He had a cerbal infarct at christmas admitted to Hospital in London Psychiatric doctors are denying it and jkeeping him at Highgate mental health clinic Dartmouth Park hill Highgate London.

HE HAS BEEN HELD FOR 7 MONTHS NO BODY HAS POSTED anything dont know why.

Alzheimer’s could be an infectious diseases, UT Houston researchers conclude

Mice injected with human Alzheimer’s brain cells developed progressive Alzheimer’s brain changes & symptoms in every case. Now the focus is on how transmission might happen normally.



foxnews, Tuesday, 04 Oct 2011:
The brain damage that characterizes Alzheimer's disease may start out in a form similar to that of infectious diseases, according to a new study.

The underlying mechanism of Alzheimer's is very similar to prion diseases like mad cow and its human form, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.

It involves a normal protein that becomes misshapen and is able to spread by transforming good proteins into bad ones.

The bad proteins accumulate in the brain and form plaque deposits that are believed to kill neuron cells.

For the current study, researchers injected the brain tissue of an Alzheimer's patient into mice and compared the results to those from injected tissue of a control without the disease.

None of the mice injected with the control showed symptoms of Alzheimer's, while all of those injected with Alzheimer's brain extracts developed plaques and other brain changes associated with the disease.

Researchers said the findings open the possibility that sporadic Alzheimer's cases may arise from infectious processes. According to the Alzheimer's Association, of the estimated 5.4 million cases of Alzheimer's in the United States, 90 percent are sporadic.

"We took a normal mouse model that spontaneously does not develop any brain damage and injected a small amount of Alzheimer's human brain tissue into the animal's brain," said Claudio Soto, professor of neurology at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

"The mouse developed Alzheimer's over time and it spread to other portions of the brain. We are currently working on whether disease transmission can happen in real life under more natural routes of exposure."

The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Common Cause of All Forms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Discovered

ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2011) — The underlying disease process of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS and Lou Gehrig's disease), a fatal neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims, has long eluded scientists and prevented development of effective therapies. Scientists weren't even sure all its forms actually converged into a common disease process. But a new Northwestern Medicine study for the first time has identified a common cause of all forms of ALS. The basis of the disorder is a broken down protein recycling system in the neurons of the spinal cord and the brain. Optimal functioning of the neurons relies on efficient recycling of the protein building blocks in the cells.

In ALS, that recycling system is broken. The cell can't repair or maintain itself and becomes severely damaged. The discovery by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine researchers, published in the journal Nature, provides a common target for drug therapy and shows that all types of ALS are, indeed, tributaries, pouring into a common river of cellular incompetence.

"This opens up a whole new field for finding an effective treatment for ALS," said senior author Teepu Siddique, M.D., the Les Turner ALS Foundation/Herbert C. Wenske Professor of the Davee Department of Neurology and Clinical Neurosciences at Northwestern's Feinberg School and a neurologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

"We can now test for drugs that would regulate this protein pathway or optimize it, so it functions as it should in a normal state."

The discovery of the breakdown in protein recycling may also have a wider role in other neurodegenerative diseases, specifically the dementias. These include Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia as well as Parkinson's disease, all of which are characterized by aggregations of proteins, Siddique said.

The removal of damaged or misfolded proteins is critical for optimal cell functioning, he noted.

This breakdown occurs in all three forms of ALS: hereditary, which is called familial; ALS that is not hereditary, called sporadic; and ALS that targets the brain, ALS/dementia. In related research, Feinberg School researchers also discovered a new gene mutation present in familial ALS and ALS/dementia, linking these two forms of the disease.

Siddique has been searching for the causes and underlying mechanism of ALS for more than a quarter century. He said he was initially drawn to it because, ...

News not from the PACE trial: sheep are smarter than previously believed

News, University of Cambridge:

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have discovered that sheep are more intelligent than previously believed.

Despite having a comparable brain size to other highly evolved animals, sheep have been historically perceived as unintelligent and were therefore not considered to be good animal models for studying diseases that affect learning and memory.

However, new research recently published in the journal PLoS ONE shows that sheep are indeed smarter than previously believed. Read more>>

Hello Politicians, start listening to the people

THE JOBBING DOCTOR:

The smootching continues, with David (Call-me-Dave) Cameron, the Prime Minister, inviting hand-picked groups of my colleagues to Downing Street to be impressed by the surroundings and baubles. I'm sure that selected high ups from the medical establishment were there. The press release talks in breathless prose about 4000 GPs being represented.

It seems to be about trying to win the argument for change being essential, and the proposed change being the best way forward.

The problem is that virtually nobody is in the least bit convinced. Certainly not the workers, as responses from the BMA, the RCN and the Unions demonstrate.

I would like to point out ... Read more>>

Eating nuts, seeds and fish helps against mild cognitive impairment

Editor's Choice, Medical News Today, 27 Jan 2011:

Mayo Clinic researchers found that the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment decreased with an increase in the consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Monounsaturated fatty acids are commonly found in olive oil and canola oils, and polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as Omega 3 or Omega 6 fatty acids, are commonly found in most varieties of nuts, seeds and fish.

<--->

Mild cognitive impairment is an intermediate state between normal cognitive aging and dementia.

Individuals with mild cognitive impairment can function reasonably well in everyday activities, but may have difficulty remembering details of recent conversations, events and upcoming appointments, or in planning and making decisions.

Most (but not all) patients with mild cognitive impairment develop a progressive decline in their thinking abilities over time. Alzheimer's disease is usually the underlying cause, but some patients may progress to other types of dementias. Read more>>

Warning: Food for thought

Warning: Scientists discover mad cow disease-causing prions infect through air

Thursday, January 27, 2011 by: S. L. Baker, features writer:

(NaturalNews) Cancer and Alzheimer's disease are usually described as the two most dreaded health disorders. But there is probably no more ghastly way to suffer and inevitably die than to contract so-called mad cow disease or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Prions are known to cause mad cow disease, also termed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans. These infectious agents produce a progressive and always lethal break-down of brain cells; they literally turn brains into sponge-like mush.

It is well established that these nightmarish infections can be spread by surgical instruments contaminated by prions and, more rarely, through blood transfusions.

Food made from BSE-infected cows can also induce the disease.

But mainstream medicine has long insisted that prions can't cause disease in the way common flu or cold viruses do -- by traveling through the air and being inhaled into the body. In fact, the scientific community has long declared that airborne prions are no threat to health.

Turns out, they've made a deadly and dangerous mistake.

Swiss scientists at the University of Zurich ... Read more>>

NICE guidance: new draft overturns decision made in 2007

By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor, 18 Jan 2011:

Three drugs that had been restricted to those with moderate to severe symptoms will be made available to those in the early stages of the disease to slow its progression, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has said.

It means patients will no longer be diagnosed with the debilitating condition only to be sent away to wait for their symptoms to worsen before they can be treated.

A fourth drug which was restricted to those with severe symptoms will also be made available to a wider group of patients.

The draft guidance overturns a decision made in 2007 to restrict the drugs because of uncertainty over their cost effectiveness.

New research and calculations have now been conducted by independent teams showing that the drugs work in patients with mild symptoms and offer a large enough benefit to justify the cost of around £2.80 per patient per day. Read more>>

Inquiry into UK dementia spending

BBC News, 31 December 2010:

The spiralling cost of caring for dementia patients is to be the subject of a major inquiry by MPs and peers.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Dementia will look at how funds could be spent more effectively.

Dementia patient Dom Pancucci and Andrew Ketteringham from the Alzheimer's Society told the BBC that money-saving programmes could still improve care.

Dementia care in the UK is currently estimated to cost £20bn a year, and is likely to rise to around £27bn by 2018.