A new Brown University Medical School study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease supports a growing body of clinical evidence indicating that Alzheimer’s may be a new form of diabetes. The study found that brain levels of insulin and related cellular receptors fall precipitously during the early stages of Alzheimer’s and that insulin levels continue to drop progressively as the disease becomes more severe. Previous posts on Alzheimer’s-related matters are here.

In one of my earlier posts about the Merck/Vioxx case, I observed somewhat facetiously that the risks associated with aspirin would probably deter any pharmaceutical company today from making the investment necessary to bring the drug to market. In this Medical Progress Today piece, pharmaceutical expert Derek Lowe confirms that my speculation is almost certainly correct:

[I]f you were somehow able to change history so that aspirin had never been discovered until this year, I can guarantee you that it would have died in the lab. No modern drug development organization would touch it.

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A Yale University study of 1,022 patients over the age of 50 published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine concludes that obstructive sleep apnea more than doubles the risk of a stroke or death and that severe cases of sleep apnea more than triple the risk, even after even adjustment for other stroke-risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity. A number of previous studies have found links between sleep apnea and serious cardiovascular disease, but a link between sleep apnea and strokes had not yet been established. Strokes are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease and cancer.

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Coming off his Texas barbeque excursion, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen notes that J. Eric Oliver, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, has entered the debate a new book called Fat Politics (Oxford 2005), in which Professor Oliver argues that a handful of doctors, government bureaucrats and health researchers — funded by the drug and weight-loss industry — have campaigned to classify more than sixty million Americans as “overweight,” to inflate the health risks of being fat, and to promote the idea that obesity is a killer disease. The Publishers Weekly review of the book notes the following:

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As the U.S. goes about recovering from the double whammy punch of the two hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast region over the past month or so, this NY Times article reminds us that a potentially much more serious threat to our well-being is looming on the horizon:

“Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history’s most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.
The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The findings, the scientists say, reveal a small number of genetic changes that may explain why the virus was so lethal. The work also confirms the legitimacy of worries about the bird flu viruses that are now emerging in Asia.
The new studies find that today’s bird flu viruses share some of the crucial genetic changes that occurred in the 1918 flu. The scientists suspect that with the 1918 flu, changes in just 25 to 30 out of about 4,400 amino acids in the viral proteins turned the virus into a killer. The bird flus, known as H5N1 viruses, have a few, but not all of those changes.”

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According to this Washington Post article, now daydreaming may be hazardous to your health:

The brain areas involved in daydreaming, musing and other stream-of-consciousness thoughts appear to be the same regions targeted by Alzheimer’s disease, researchers are reporting today in an unusual study that offers new insights into the roots of the deadly illness.

While some unknown third factor may be responsible for triggering daydreaming as well as Alzheimer’s, . . . a causative link between the two would explain a mystery that has long bothered scientists: why Alzheimer’s generally affects memory first. . . [T]the undirected thought patterns that most people slip into readily may result in the kind of “wear and tear” that ends in Alzheimer’s disease, . . .
This theory, however, clashes with the evidence that intellectual activity plays a protective role against Alzheimer’s disease. Far from the “wear and tear” model, other research has suggested that the brain runs on a “use it or lose it” system.

The best observation in the article is from a scientist who cautions that the findings are preliminary and should be taken with a grain of salt:

“I look forward to the public health campaign to stop people from engaging in these dangerous, risky behaviors,” he quipped. “Maybe we can equip ourselves with anti-daydreaming monitors that shock us when we slip into reverie.”

Read the entire article.

Don’t miss Tom Mayo’s interesting analysis of the difficulty that the mainstream media has in explaining the context under which Susan Torres, a brain dead Virginia woman, gave birth to a baby girl this past Tuesday. Tom observes about the headline for the AP/Yahoo story:

Once dead, a patient can’t die again. But, amazingly, 37 years after the Ad Hoc Harvard Medical School report on “irreversible coma,” the public’s resistance to the notion of neurological criteria for death is curiously persistent.