Why More Education Leads To Fewer Signs of Dementia In The Elderly
July 27, 2010
After more than a decade of puzzling over why people who continue their educations longer have a lower risk of developing dementia, researchers have come up with an answer.
Do the brains of the more educated resist disease better?
Nope. The answer is that people with more education cope better with changes in the brain associated with dementia, say researchers in England and Finland.
Researchers, by examining the brains of 872 people who took part in three large aging studies, had concluded previously that each additional year of education results in an 11% decrease in the risk of developing dementia.
But they had, until now, been unable to say definitively whether or not education—which is linked to higher socioeconomic status and healthier lifestyles—protects the brain against dementia.
The new study, led by Professor Carol Brayne, an epidemiologist and public health physician at the University of Cambridge, shows people with different levels of education, in fact, have similar brain pathology. That is, disease that causes dementia was as prevalent the brains of people who had extensive educations as those who did not. The difference, say the researchers, is that those with more education are better able to compensate for the effects of dementia.
Other researchers have long suspected that the ability of well-educated people to cope with damage to their brains, known as cognitive reserve, explained why, at a certain point, the better educated appeared to decline more rapidly if dementia appeared. They theorized that the disease process was probably already more advanced by the time the brains of those with more education could no longer cope.
“Previous research has shown that there is not a one-to-one relationship between being diagnosed with dementia during life and changes seen in the brain at death,” said co-author Dr Hannah Keage of the University of Cambridge. “One person may show lots of pathology in their brain while another shows very little, yet both may have had dementia. Our study shows education in early life appears to enable some people to cope with a lot of changes in their brain before showing dementia symptoms.”
This study, which uses data from the EClipSE collaboration—which combines three European population-based longitudinal studies—was able to pinpoint the relationship between education and dementia.
The study strengthens the case for investment in early education, says Brayne. “This is hugely relevant to policy decisions about the importance of resource allocation between health and education.”
The results of the study are published in the journal Brain. This post was adapted from material on Science Daily and my prior interviews with neuroscients. Further details of EClipSE are available at
Rx For Learning And The Brain: Music; The Duke of Uke Demonstrates & Nina Kraus Explains
July 23, 2010
Nothing attests to the hunger for music more than the ubiquitous sight of thin white wires draped like jewelry from ears and plugged into devices, playing who knows what: Bach? Beyonce? Bieber?
Noticing the other day how many riders on the subway were wired up, I mused that it was no wonder Dr. Rudolfo Llinás, a giant of modern neuroscience, speaks of the the life of cells in the brain as looking “like a Riverdance perfomance,” with “some cells tapping in harmony and some … silent, creating myriads of patterns that represent the properties of the external world. Cells with the same rhythm form circuits to bind information in time.”
Nor does it surprise that an explosion of studies in recent years has suggested that music on the brain is a good thing, good for learning and longevity. Consider this disparate group of musicians and their current ages: BB King, 84; Earl Scrugg, 86, Ravi Shankar, 90, ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, 95; and Pinetop Perkins, 96; or the world’s oldest performing musician, Bill Tapia, the Duke of the Uke, 102, who appeared recently at the New York Uke Festival.
Now a data-driven review has pulled together studies linking musical training to learning, from skills ranging from language to memory. And scientists who published their work this week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience say that collectively the research has significant implications for education.
Playing an instrument, the researchers say, primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians.
“The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant,” Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature perspective, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
“A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound,” Kraus said. “In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean.” The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication, she said.
Musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words, according to literature gathered in the Nature review. Children who are musically trained show stronger neural activation to pitch changes in speech and have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training.
And musicians trained to hear sounds embedded in a rich network of melodies and harmonies are primed to understand speech in a noisy background. They exhibit both enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities that give them a distinct advantage for processing speech in challenging listening environments compared with non-musicians.
Children with learning disorders are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise, according to the article. “Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise.”
Their review, Northwestern researchers conclude, argues for serious investing of resources in music training in schools accompanied with rigorous examinations of the effects of such instruction on listening, learning, memory, attention and literacy skills.
(Part of this post was adapted from materials provided by by Northwestern University.)
Book Making: Deirdre Capone’s ‘Uncle Al’ And Family Feuds
July 20, 2010
Gangster Al Capone’s relatives, real and sham, have recently been trying to take his notorious name to the bank. Family feuds have, as a result, been brewing.
A memoir, ‘Uncle Al Capone,’ written by Deirdre Marie Capone, the great niece of the Chicago mobster once known as Public Enemy #1, is at the center of the controversy, according to a bylined story by David Kesmodel in today’s Wall Street Journal.
But money is not her goal, says the 70-year-old Florida grandmother.
After decades of research and at the insistence of her children, she hopes to renovate the family name by telling what it was really like growing up Capone. “Just because you have Capone blood does not mean that you are monster. It really makes me angry,” she said.
Al Capone, she says, was really just a “big kid” who enjoyed rolling on the carpet with her, soothed her when she fell from an apple tree, and taught her to swim in the pool of his house in Miami. It was there that Al Capone lived from the time of his release from prison in 1939—after serving eight years of his sentence for a conviction on charges of tax evasion—until his death from syphilis on Jan. 25, 1947, the date of Deirdre’s seventh birthday. Though government prosecutors believed Al Capone was responsible for as many as 500 murders, they never succeeded in forging a case against him on those charges.
But the Capone name became synonymous with rampant brutality thanks to the ceaseless mythologizing of the press, says Dierdre Marie Capone. As a result, her father, Ralph, a graduate of Notre Dame and Loyola University Law School, committed suicide in 1950, at age 33. Otherwise, she says, he might have redeemed the family name the way that John F. Kennedy did the Kennedy name. “He was a brilliant man,” she said. “I want to give my father’s short life back to him.”
For years, she used her father’s middle name, Gabriel, to hide her true identity. She learned early that her real last name was a blight. Not long after Al Capone’s death, parents at the Catholic school she attended in Chicago discovered that she was a Capone from press reports of her first communion. From then on, they forbid their children to ever play with her.
In our interview, she declined to disclose her married name, where she lives, or the names of any current or former jobs or employers. She claimed to have worked as a “business executive” and said she had sat at tables with senators and governors. “There are still a lot of people out there who would like to be the one to shoot the last Capone,” she said to explain her reticence. “I try to keep my adult life out of it.”
Still, she was interviewed on NBC’s Today Show two years ago:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
While the Wall Street Journal story said she plans to publish her book this fall, she currently has no book contract. Even if her book gets published, she won’t make buyers out of some Capones.
“I wouldn’t read it if somebody bought it for me,” Theresa Capone, Al Capone’s granddaughter, told Kesmodel. She said she was furious about revelations in the recently published book, “Get Capone,” by Jonathan Eig, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. The book cites a claim by Deirdre Marie Capone that Theresa’s father, Albert “Sonny” Capone, was not the son of Al Capone’s wife, Mae, but of a young woman who died in childbirth. “It is totally and completely false.”
Meanwhile, Chris Knight Capone, the 38-year-old author of a self-published and ghost written book, Son of Scarface, has also angered the Capone clan by filing a lawsuit in Chicago to have the gangster’s remains exhumed to prove that his father, Bill Knight, was Al Capone’s son. After years of research, in 2008, Chris Knight changed his last name to Capone.
And then there’s Dominic Capone III. His relation to Al Capone is also questioned. Nonetheless, he’s been capitalizing on it with his “Capone Family Secret” tomato sauce, which he sells at 188 grocery stores in the Chicago area, and via PayPal. It pulled in about $300,000 last year, he recently told Lou Carloza of AOL’s Wallet Pop. “We’ve been doing really good—in fact, a lot better than we thought we’d do.”
Dominic, an actor who starred as Al Capone in the TV documentary “The Real Untouchables,” claims the sauce’s recipe was handed down to him by his grandfather Ralph. However, Deirdre Marie discounts his claim of being related to the gangster. Asked what the real relation was, he said, “I can’t really say. It’s a little scandalous, what’s going on in the Capone family.”
George Steinbrenner and Robert Butler’s Different Legacies
July 13, 2010
Maybe deaths do arrive in bunches. It’s hard to resist taking note of the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, at age 80, on Tuesday. But I’d much rather use the bulk of this blog to pay tribute to Dr. Robert Butler, whose intensely-researched, muscular positivity about aging transformed the field of geriatrics. He coined the phrase “ageism,” drew attention to discrimination against the elderly, and effectively challenged the once widely-held notion that senility was inevitable. I was away when he died of leukemia, at 83, on July 6. I was sorry to miss the opportunity to post something then.
Dr. Robert Butler in Central Park in 2006. Photo by Robert Caplin for The New York Times
It, of course, makes no sense to measure one life against another.
Steinbrenner, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years, spent a lot of money, fired a lot of managers, insulted a lot of people, and, to the joy of Yankees fans and the jealousy of others, celebrated a lot of World Series victories. Seven, to be exact. He returned the pinstriped franchise to its status as the greatest sports team in history and, in various ways, earned the sobriquet “The Boss.”
Oft repeated in news reports today, he parleyed an $8.7 million investment (including a meager personal contribution of about $170,000) into an entity worth $1.6 billion. The chorus of commentators dutifully recited Steinbrenner’s self-proclaimed love of winning and hatred of losing.
(I switched my allegiance from the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Rupert Murdoch bought them, to the Yankees. At least, I rationalized, Steinbrenner wasn’t despoiling journalism. Besides my sons were New York City boys coming of age to baseball. They shared Steinbrenner’s enthusiasm for winning. And, honestly, I joined and benefited from the pleasures of cheering along with them.)
But as legacies go, for all the ballyhoo about the Yankee dynasty created under Steinbrenner, I’ll go with Butler’s.
He not only put the field of geriatrics on the map, he was responsible for a radical sea change in our society’s attitude toward the elderly and aging, a change of fundamental importance in the civil rights of every American. It stands right beside the civil rights victories that have been won for blacks and women.
In the 1975 book that earned Butler his Pulitzer, “Why Survive? Being Old in America,” he wrote, “Human beings need the freedom to live with change, to invent and reinvent themselves a number of times through their lives.” He had no patience with romanticizing aging or with the elderly content to live out their lives amusing themselves.
In an interview with Josh Tapper, a fellow of News21, a national initiative to promote innovation in journalism, three days before Butler’s death, he said, pointedly: “I think a lot of older people are sitting on their asses, playing golf, and not making a contribution to society.”
Butler was still putting in 60-hour work weeks as the founder and C.E.O. of the International Longevity Center in New York.
He couldn’t sit still for the course of the interview, jumping up to grab me a soda (he was sipping from a can of Coke) or a New York Times clipping on elder abuse, Tapper wrote.
“I’m very lucky,” he said. “I’ve got good health.”
At the end of their talk, Butler surprised his interviewer by asking how long he wanted to live. “As long as I enjoy life,” Tapper told him. He immediately regretted his vague answer.
Perhaps Butler knew he didn’t have long to live, Tapper speculated.
“I think you’ve said it right,” Butler assured the younger man. “You want to live as long as you enjoy life. That’s the real truth.”
Mixed Messages as W. S. Merwin Is Named Poet Laureate at 82
July 3, 2010
News stories reporting this week that W. S. Merwin had been named the 17th poet laureate of the United States were quick to note that the 82-year-old poet leads a relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation in Hawaii. (I always thought poets were supposed to lead relatively reclusive lives. Isn’t that how poetry gets written?)
These stories seemed to ask, albeit gingerly, whether Merwin would be vigorous, public, or peripatetic enough to promote poetry in our celebrity and internet-dominated age. After all, Merwin (Heavens!) even eschews the computer for his writing of poetry.
I found myself wondering about the subtle ways of ageism.
Were Merwin younger, wouldn’t reporters have been curious if the poet, who has written deeply for years about the environment, saw irony in being named poet laureate as the worst environmental accident in history, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, was still unfolding? I wondered, too, at the curiosity that one of America’s most mindful poets would assume office at the very moment there is a debate roiling over whether life on the web is harming our ability to concentrate and think profoundly.
Forty years ago, Merwin, the Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister who won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971, was well-known as a powerful voice in protests against the Vietnam War. Last year, he won his second Pulitzer for his most recent collection, The Shadow of Sirius, in which he writes about memory and mortality.
The Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Lund reported that there were those who were disappointed that a poet more like “Robert Pinsky, the most effective laureate to date,” had not been selected. She commented that Pinsky had, as laureate, exhibited the “zeal of an activist and the charisma of a celebrity. The George Clooney of the poetry world, if you will.”
New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen, noted that Merwin “retains traces of the extravagant handsomeness of his youth,” and reported that after he had learned of the announcement of his appointment, he told her by telephone he wasn’t looking forward to having his life disrupted, though he does “relish” taking a more public part in the conversation about poetry. “I do like a very quiet life,” he said. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.”
It should be said that in their stories both reporters ultimately embraced Merwin’s masterful, elliptical, and frequently mysterious poems. Rooted in mindful attentiveness to the everyday, his poems often have a quicksilver quality to them.
“It’s a joy to be part of everything that’s living, and to be able to give something back sometimes,” Merwin, who moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, told NPR’s Melissa Block. His move to Hawaii was inspired by his interest in Zen Buddhism and the notion of living a wholistic life. He has said that he plans to use his new post to draw attention to the poetry of indigenous cultures and the power of translation, something at which he has also given great service in his career as a poet.
What’s important about naming Merwin poet laureate is the degree to which his mind, not the lineaments of his face, has retained and deepened a life and a body of work made of the mix of devotion to craft, consciousness, and imagination. Perhaps his tenure will be quieter and more contemplative than Pinsky’s was, but it will be the manifestation of his way of being in the world, not solely a function of age. And it seems that we could, at this moment, profit considerably from his mindful example.
Here’s “Separation,” a beautiful 3-line poem he wrote early in his career and which Block asked a surprised Merwin to read on air.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—
And here’s one I like a great deal:
“I Live Up Here”
I live up here
And a little bit to the left
And I go down only
For the accidents and then
Never a moment too soon
Just the same it’s a life it’s plenty
The stairs the petals she loves me
Every time
Nothing has changed
Oh down there down there
Every time
The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood
In the pans of the scales the helmets
Brim over with water
It’s perfectly fair
The pavements are dealt out the dice
Every moment arrive somewhere
You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs
Their bells stalling
And then silence comes with the plate and I
Give what I can
Feeling It’s worth it
For I see
What my votes the mice are accomplishing
And I know I’m free
This is how I live
Up here and simply
Others do otherwise
Maybe
——
And here’s Merwin talking to NPR’s Terry Gross in 2008 on memory, mortality, and the writing process.
Cell Rest and Teen Exercise Are Keys To Later Brain Health
July 1, 2010
It can’t be said too often: to protect your brain, exercise! Now, two new studies are adding more emphasis to physical activity— and greater understanding to the interplay between exercise, aging and the exquisite balance that preserves the brain’s reservoir of stem cells for later life.
One study focused on the cellular mechanism that keeps neural stem cell division in check. The other correlated the lack of teenage exercise with cognitive impairment in later life.
In the first, scientists at the Salk Institute of Biological Research in La Jolla, California, underscored how physical activity balances neural stem cell quiescence— stem cells are at rest— and keep them from their dormancy from becoming dominant in later life while it helps stimulate the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the brain’s hub of memory.
Image: Courtesy of Dr. Helena Mira, Carlos III Health Institute, Madrid
The other study, of 9,344 women from Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, compared at activity levels at teenage, age 30, age 50, and late life with cognitive decline. Reported June 30 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, it held alarming implications in an era of declining physical activity for youths.
“Our study shows that women who are regularly physically active at any age have lower risk of cognitive impairment than those who are inactive,” said lead researcher Laura Middletton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. “But … being physically active at teenage is most important in preventing cognitive impairment.”
Researchers, led by Laura Middleton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, found that being physically active at any stage of life lowers the risk of cognitive impairment in old age. But “being physically active at teenage is most important in preventing cognitive impairment,” said lead researcher Laura Middleton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Canada.
The researchers also determined that women who were physically inactive at teenage but became physically active at age 30 and age 50 had significantly reduced odds of cognitive impairment relative to those who remained physically inactive. In contrast, being physically active at age 30 and age 50 was not significantly associated with rates of cognitive impairment in those women who were already physically active at teenage.
“To minimize the risk of dementia, physical activity should be encouraged from early life,” Middleton said, adding, “Not to be without hope, people who were inactive at teenage can reduce their risk of cognitive impairment by becoming active in later life.”
The mechanisms by which cognition benefits from physical activity across the life course are believed multi-factorial. Much evidence already suggests that physical activity positively effects brain plasticity and cognition and that physical activity reduces the rates and severity of vascular risk factors, such as hypertension, obesity, and type II diabetes associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment.
“Low physical activity levels in today’s youth may mean increased dementia rates in the future. Dementia prevention programs and other health promotion programs encouraging physical activity should target people starting at very young ages, not just in mid- and late life,” said Middleton.
Some of the cognitive issues of aging may be the result of an unchallenged process by which stem cells in the brain remain dormant until called upon to produce more neurons, ensuring a pool of neurons that lasts a lifetime.
In research published in the July 1 issue of Cell Stem Cell, researchers identified the importance of bone morphogenetic factor protein (BMP) in preventing the rampant proliferation and depletion of neural stem cells.
Using prior observation that quiescent neural stem cells express the BMP receptor 1A as a starting point, co-first author Helena Mira, formerly a post-doc in senior author Fred H. Gage’s Laboratory for Genetics at the Salk Institute and now an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Development at the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid, and her collaborators investigated the role of BMP signaling in regulating the proliferation of stem cells located in the hippocampus, one of two brain regions harboring neural stem cells.
They found that BMP signaling, which is triggered by the interaction of BMPs with their receptors, is inactive in most proliferating cells, whereas it is active in non-dividing cells, including quiescent stem cells and differentiated neurons. Unlike stem cells, mature neurons express BMP receptor 1B, which will be the focus of future studies.
Experiments with cultured neural stem cells confirmed that it was indeed BMP that kept them quiet. BMP’s anti-proliferative effect was blocked when BMP was replaced with a protein known as Noggin, which binds and inactivates members of the BMP family.
The researchers observed the same effect when they delivered Noggin directly into the brains of adult mice. Here, too, Noggin successfully interfered with BMP signaling and raised quiescent stem cells out of their slumber. After one week, those neural stem cells had started dividing and their offspring were well on their way to becoming neurons.
When neural stem cells were forced to proliferate over prolonged periods of time, however, the pool of active neural stem cells was depleted, suggesting to Gage and his team that quiescence functions as a protective mechanism that counteracts stem cell exhaustion.
“It tells you how finely this process is regulated,” says Mira. “BMP ensures a sufficiently big population of quiescent stem cells that can feed into the system when called upon.”
Gage, the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases, will next investigate whether BMP is the linchpin that links exercise, aging and neurogenesis. “As we age, the number of new neurons declines but physical exercise brings that number back up,” he said. “Our findings raise the possibility that the BMP signal becomes dominant over time, forcing neural stem cells deeper into quiescence and thus making it harder to generate new brain cells.”
This post was based on reports at the Salk Insitute website, at http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=428