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The importance of a healthy diet for proper functioning of the brain is increasingly being recognized. Week in, week out studies appear recommending a high intake of certain foods in order to achieve optimal brain function and prevent brain diseases. Although it is definitely no punishment for the most of us to increase our chocolate consumption to boost brain function, the most important period during which nutrition affects our brain may already be behind us.

The post The lifelong importance of nutrition in pregnancy for brain development appeared first on OUPblog.

When medical conditions affect children or the people in their lives, one of the most daunting aspects of their situation is how to cope. The management of a disease or disability is one thing, the understanding why they have it and why others react the way they do is another. Picture books are marvellous non-invasive […]

The human brain might be perceived as an organ with two main strategic tasks: goal-directed motor behavior, and mental functioning in order to work out that goal. These two main functions have two prototypical diseases: Alzheimer disease, in case of mental function, and Parkinson’s disease, with motor function. Following its inception as an entity, Parkinson’s disease (PD) was long perceived to be a purely motor disorder with unimpaired mental functions.

The post Parkinson’s disease: the flip side of the coin appeared first on OUPblog.

About 500,000 Canadians are living with Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia. This number is expected to soar to 1.1 million within 25 years. To date, there is no definitive way for health care professionals to forecast the onset of dementia in a patient with memory complaints. However, new research provides a glimmer of hope.

As a geriatrician, I have been looking at walking speed and variability as a predictor of dementia’s progression and whether it is associated with physical changes in the brain.

The “Gait and Brain Study” is a longitudinal cohort study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). It assessed up to 150 seniors with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — a pre-dementia syndrome — in order to detect an early predictor of cognitive and mobility decline, and progression to dementia.

While walking has long been considered an automatic motor task, emerging evidence suggests cognitive function plays a key role in the control of walking, avoidance of obstacles, and maintenance of navigation.

In our recent research, my team asked people with mild cognitive impairment to walk on a specially-designed mat linked to a computer. The computer recorded the individual’s walking gait variability and speed. This information was then compared to their walking gait while simultaneously performing a demanding cognitive task, such as counting backwards or doing calculations while walking (“walking-while-talking”).

It was subsequently determined that some specific gait characteristics are associated with high variability, particularly during walking-while-talking. These gait abnormalities were more marked in MCI individuals with the worst episodic memory and with executive dysfunction revealing a motor signature of cognitive impairment.

If confirmed in subsequent studies, these gait changes can be an effective predictor of cognitive decline and may eventually help with earlier diagnoses of dementia.

Finding early dementia detection methods is vital. In the future, it is conceivable that we will be able to make diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias before people even have significant memory loss. We believe that gait, as a complex brain-motor task, provides a golden window of opportunity for researchers to see brain function. The high variability observed in people with mild cognitive impairment can be seen as a “gait arrhythmia,” predicting mobility decline, falls, and now, cognitive impairment. Our hope is to combine these methods with promising new medications to slow or halt the progression of mild cognitive impairment to dementia.

Image Credit: Elderly person walking CC0 via Pixabay

The post Gait disturbances can help to predict dementia in older adults appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Most likely you’ve near heard of the writer who I’ve selected as the Beacon of Light for 2014, but he has served as my inspiration this past year, illuminating the shoals of self-doubt and guiding me past the fears and uncertainties that often accompany the writing process. The writer’s name is Chuck Entwistle, a friend of mine from our days as grad students in the MFA program at Vermont

Last weekend I went to visit my friend, Chuck, a writer of books for adults and children, whose nonfiction stories have appeared in Cricket magazine and elsewhere. We began meeting every month or so after I moved to Florida a decade ago. Both of us attended the same graduate writing program in Vermont and had met while sharing the dorm floor that had been reserved for the men in the program

Gianna is just about as scattered as the autumn leaves that she is supposed to be collecting for her science project. Deadlines are just so hard! The only time that her head is clear is when she is out running. Unfortunately, her next track meet could be in jeopardy because of her science project. Her coach lets Gianna know that if she doesn’t turn in her leaf project on time, she will not be running in the sectional meet!

Thankfully Gianna does have some help. Her best friend Zig is pretty much the opposite of Gianna. Organized to a fault, he tries to get Gianna back on track by taking her out on a bike ride and hike that should have Gianna all set.

But Gianna’s dreamy nature, a back stabbing classmate, and some serious troubles at home with her Nonna may just be too much for Gee to handle.

Kate Messner has written a poignant novel about family, friendship, and change. Gianna is so close to her Nonna, and the possible onset of Alzheimer’s is a reality that many families face, but not many kids get to read about in a relevant way. Messner handles this weighty topic with grace. Gianna is a lovely mix of a dreamer, an artist, and an advocate. Messner also excels in her descriptions of Gianna’s Vermont town as well as the market in Montreal. I lived in Montreal for a couple of years during grad school, and the pages describing it had me yearning to go back! Gianna is a girl who readers woul like to meet again.

Cristina Henríquez. The World In Half. NY: Riverhead Books, 2009.
ISBN 9781594488559


Michael Sedano

Cristina Henríquez’ The World In Half is a deceptively complex, deeply romantic novel that should be next on your summer reading list, and an ideal choice for book groups who enjoy a rich discussion that balances decisions looked back on from middle age against possibilities open only to youth. Deceptive because on its surface it recounts a naïve young woman’s search for an absent father whose identity has been a closely guarded secret by a steely, abrasive mother. Complex because the still-young mother’s mind has begun to fail under the merciless attack of Alzheimer’s Disease. As mother’s memory fades, the daughter fears what her own future health may bring, the total loss of her mother, and along with that, all connection to the mystery of her father.

Miraflores Reid, “Mira,” a University of Chicago scholarship student majoring in Geology, knows only that her mother lived in Panama with her husband, a Marine stationed in the Zone, where she conceived the child with an unnamed local. The pregnant woman returned to New York to live with her family near West Point, where Catherine Reid’s father taught. Mira wonders how difficult the pregnancy and birth must have been in that small-minded military town. Catherine is white. Was Gatún black? Danilo has “brown” skin, and Mira may “look” Puerto Rican, or like a local of whom Panameño travelers ask directions.

Escaping that life, Catherine takes her child to Chicago where she works a series of survival jobs as waitress, pizza delivery, receptionist. Mother keeps a wall between herself and the social world, treating others abruptly and welcoming little humor or flirtation into her privacy. Mira carries herself similarly, but this may simply reflect her nerdly scientific bent.

Much of the mother’s personality emerges over the course of the story. Early in the novel, as Mira is organizing her mother’s property, she comes across a box of letters her father mailed to the woman who abandoned him. Mira’s mother led the daughter to believe the man had no interest in either of them. The letters open Mira to a poetic and broken heart whose longing for a daughter and fugitive lover cries off the pages.

The letters provide two vital clues to help Mira unravel the mystery. A name, Gatún Gallardo, and an address in Panama. With these, the desperate young woman launches herself on an ill-planned, desperate quest to recover the facts of her own birth and reconnect with the heart-broken man. Fortunately for Miraflores, her mother has enrolled the child in Spanish language classes and, as a Spanish minor, she has superb bilingual skills.

Arriving in Panamá--note the diacritic, an authorial denotation that the English-language narrative is taking place in the local idiom—Mira makes friends with Hernán, a hotel bellman, and his nephew Danilo, an ambulante flower seller. Hernán invites Mira to move into their home while Danilo helps Mira track down the clues leading to her father. Danilo warms to the task of tour guide and intercultural informant.

Mira is a guileless virgin and would be easy prey for a womanizing school dropout like Danilo. But he wants to be her friend. In fact, the most serious crisis in their relationship occurs when, nearing the end of her stay, a drunk Mira caresses her host in a late-night conversation. He bolts and she spends the next day tracking him down instead of tracking down clues to her still-unreachable father.

Danilo looks into Mira’s heart and fears, and draws them out in conversation. On the surface, they talk of her fears that Alzheimer’s will strike Mira young, as it has her mother. On a different level is the parallel of Catherine coming to Panama to find a man, and here is the daughter, come to Panama and finding a man. The mother, nineteen years earlier, had returned home pregnant. Now here is the fruitless frustration Mira experiences of not finding any trace of her mother’s lover, even as Danilo unwittingly draws Mira’s affection toward himself.

The canal across the isthmus cut the world in half. That is what the laborers who dug the waterway used to say. Alzheimer’s is cutting Catherine and Mira’s world in half, as their personalities do in their social world. Mira stands astride both halves, her parental history on the one side, her own future on the other. How much will history repeat itself, will Mira make the same errors her mother has, abandoning love in Panama to a bitter life of denial in Chicago? Adding complexity to themes of choice and circumstance, Danilo’s story echoes Mira’s. He’s been abandoned by his parents, a difference being he has their address and phone number but they never call. That story lurks in the background as we work through Mira’s story.

Henríquez draws a parallel between mother and daughter when Mira meets her father’s sister in a rich part of town. A box of letters Gatún Gallardo never mailed to Catherine fills in blanks missing from the letters Catherine closeted. Mira gets unreasonably angry that Hernán and Danilo knew and didn’t help until her stay was near its end. Unlike her mother, however, Mira lets it out, confronting Danilo angrily. He convinces her that friendship and love were the motive for what Hernán and Danilo suspected, only suspected. They believed it would be preferable to keep hope alive in Mira’s heart, rather than break it with a hard truth.

The World in Half tells a complex story that a casual summary can only hint at. Cristina Henríquez rewards her readers with compelling narrative and touching personal portraits of the city and residents. Much of the enjoyment of the romantic nature of the novel comes as the story unfolds, and to disclose details will spoil the pleasure of seeing it firsthand with your own eyes. One indication of this comes in the names. Both Miraflores and Gatún are names of locks on the canal. It’s not just that a lock allows the uniting of both halves of the world, but that Catherine, despite closing off her daughter’s life from her father’s, gave her daughter a name like her fathers, one that foretells her quest to bring both worlds together.

As the novel ends, Catherine’s illness grows increasingly severe and dictates much of what must come next. But beyond a daughter’s responsibilities lie the choices Miraflores can make, but that Henríquez leaves open to delicious speculation. Your book group will enjoy discussing and accounting for what happened in Catherine’s life, more so the undefined what ifs that lie ahead for a young woman like Mira and a young man like Danilo.