By Paddy Kamen, publisher BetterBrainBetterLife.com

Is it possible to turn Alzheimer’s around, to have someone walk back from a diagnosis, return to work, recall foreign languages that were lost to them, and re-grow hippocampal volume? The latest research says yes, but is that research sound? This article covers the details of this groundbreaking research, along with criticism of it. 

What constitutes crazy talk with respect to Alzheimer's treatment may be a matter of opinion. Click 'Read More' below to see where the battle lines are being drawn. 

By Paddy Kamen, Publisher, BetterBrainBetterLife.com

A brain that is in trouble can’t allow you to think and move at the same time. So says Lauren Sergio, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science at Toronto’s York University. Sergio and her colleague, Ph.D. candidate Kara Hawkins, used this fact to develop a simple test that predicts with over 80 percent accuracy who is at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Her test should frighten everyone who has a parent with this diagnosis.

By Paddy Kamen, Publisher, BetterBrainBetterLife.com

ALS may be the cruelest, most severe neurological disease,” says Clive Svendsen, director of the Regenerative Medicine Institute at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Fortunately, Svendsen and his colleagues appear to have found a potential treatment for ALS, using stem cells from patients’ own bodies.

“In these studies, we turned skin cells of patients who have ALS into motor neurons that retained the genetic defects of the disease,” says Robert H. Baloh, lead researcher and lead author of the article, published in the October 23, 2013 issue of Science Translational Medicine. “We focused on a gene, C9ORF72, that two years ago was found to be the most common cause of familial ALS and frontotemporal lobar degeneration, and even causes some cases of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. What we needed to know, however, was how the defect triggered the disease so we could find a way to treat it.”