Slow News and an Update

I have been assiduously scanning my favorite medical news feeds for news on Alzheimer's disease research.  But there hasn't been much lately, at least not anything I can condense into something my Mom would understand.  That's what I do.  When I find something, I see if I can make it something she can understand and enjoy, and then I post it.  She's pretty smart, so I'm not dumbing it down. But things have been slow lately.  The most recent real news was about aducanumab, but that's getting to be old news.

I recently scheduled my next psychometric testing.  It will be mid-June at Harborview in Seattle.  You will recall that I've been tested annually since 2015, but my neurologist had me take a break in 2019.  My test scores were very favorable year after year, and they wanted to assess whether the practice effect might be a factor.  Or that's what I inferred from what my neurologist said.  I am, of course, eager to see what the test finds.

I posted earlier that I had a subjective sense that I had lost some ground beginning in April 2019.  I had repeated trouble remembering to perform simple routine tasks, like locking the car door when I parked.  I also experienced the return of the episodes of mild depression that had occurred several times per week in 2015 and 2016.  While they only occurred once or twice a month in 2019, it was still disturbing to have them back at all.  My neurologist attributed the regression to problems with sleep and encouraged me to do what I had to do to improve my sleep.  So I've been doing what I know how to do.

One thing I know how to do is intermittent fasting.  I've settled into a regular 18 hour fast, and I feel quite well about it.  I said before that the arthritis in my neck seems relieved, but I have a lot of other painful joints.  I will need to be tested by a professional to see where I'm at cognitively.  Subjectively, I believe that I may be back where I was before the April 2019 hiccup, but I can't say for sure.  I'm confident that I'm better than I was at the end of April.  I'm sleeping better than I was when I began intermittent fasting, but I don't know if there's an actual relationship between fasting and good sleep.  When I'm tested in June I'll have been intermittent fasting for five months, so we'll see if it's possible the fasting has improved my measured cognition.  There's research associating improvement in Alzheimer's disease with intermittent fasting, but I don't know how long it takes to make a difference.