"Amsterdam" Confence, First Day

The virtual Alzheimer's Association International Conference began this morning at 6 a.m. our time, but I was still in bed.  And then I went to the food bank to work.  But when I got home I watched a number of recorded sessions and then watched the recap.  It was mostly over my head, but I did pick up a number of interesting things.

One research finding is that there is a correlation between people who have a history of getting their flu shot every year and a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease.  If they also got the pneumonia vaccine, their risk is even less.  And the risk reduction is substantial.

But correlation is not causation, and everyone is speculating on what's going on there.  Perhaps the vaccine perturbs the immune system in such a way that it provides a protective function for Alzheimer's disease.  Or maybe people who get their vaccinations are more likely to get exercise and live a more healthful lifestyle.

I haven't seen anything indicating someone wants to present research on a breakthrough drug intervention, but there are some secret presentations coming up.  So we'll see.

But we are looking for a breakthrough in early detection, and there were a number of presentations on that.  The main promise at the moment is for a blood test, and I thought we would have one by now.  That's how it looked two years ago.  What I saw today was people being very methodical about how they can correlate blood test results with actual inception of the disease, perhaps 15 years before the first symptoms.

I also saw a series of related papers on what is happening with neural activity as the disease progresses.  The different parts of the brain talk to each other, and brain waves are a part of that.  These connections seem to be perturbed during Alzheimer's disease, but not always in the way you'd believe intuitively.

You would think that neural activity would go down as Alzheimer's disease advances, and you'd believe that "neuronal hyperactivity" would indicate improving cognition.  But you'd be wrong.  Apparently, neural activity in the hippocampus rises dramatically when cognition begins to erode, but then falls often even more dramatically as the dementia advances. 

I haven't seen this elsewhere, but the researchers associated increased delta wave activity with the hippocampus.  (Neural activity generates brain waves.)  Delta waves have a frequency of 0.5 to 4 Hz, so they are very slow and are associated with deep sleep.  We know that the hippocampus is busy during deep sleep, consolidating short term memories to long term memories. 

I'm looking forward to whatever they have to share tomorrow.