There are brain training apps, but can we also make an early dementia diagnosis app? — Wanted: early diagnosis It’s difficult to estimate exactly how many people are dealing with dementia. The WHO settles on roughly 55 million, but it’s probably (a lot) more. Not everyone receives an official diagnosis and not every diagnosis was made in the same way. The number, then, is a best guess more than…

The metabolism of the naked-mole rat takes it slow at many levels, which may contribute to its long lifespan — Naked and unafraid We might not like to admit it, but we are one animal species among many. A weird one, perhaps, but still we share a lot of things with our evolutionary cousins. I often chide aging research (and hype) for being based only on specific animal models, but that doesn’t mean…

Should we start ‘stool banking’ so that we can rejuvenate our microbiomes in old age? — Growing wild We are all in a close relationship — perhaps even a symbiosis — with the microbes in our gut. Ignore these belly bugs at your own peril. They might affect how we metabolize food and how hungry we get, as well as our risk for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and…

Cancer in old people could be intrinsically different from cancer in young people — Cells, bodies, and age It’s curious how cells that refuse to die can kill us faster. Yet that’s exactly what happens with cancer. For our many trillions of cells (yes, with a ‘t’) to cooperate and form a single human body, we need pretty strict molecular rules of growth, development, and communication. Sometimes a…

Are the cognitive benefits of the Mediterranean diet due to fish consumption? — Mediterranean magic? The popular media representation of nutrition is a fast-moving field full of hypes and hopes. It seems like every day there’s another food group or nutrient we either can’t have or should have. One day bread’s going to kill you, the next day it’s the butter you spread on it. …

Not very, it seems — Track health, not disease We’ve all heard about the shift toward personalized medicine. Thanks to technology, data capture and tracking, and scientific progress, we are (slowly) becoming better at tailoring treatments and cures to individual patients. Another shift that has remained a bit more under the radar — but is equally important — is…

Do the seven simple lifestyle metrics for heart health from the American Heart Association also tell us about dementia risk? — The Simple 7 In 2010, the American Heart Association developed the Simple 7, an easy checklist of 7 items that would give you a reasonable indication of your cardiovascular health. Higher score → better cardiovascular health. The Simple 7 checklist was developed by a task force of over 170 scientists who combed through…

There will probably never be a single number to tell you old you truly are — Screw the calendar Every 365 days, we celebrate a birthday, even though we fudge the numbers a little bit every four years. One more time around the sun. Hurray. And yet, it’s pretty arbitrary, isn’t it? Cyclical astronomical events are great for tracking our conception of time, sure. But do they really tell…

By targeting a single DNA strand, a new form of CRISPR can perform more accurate genetic interventions — A crispy story CRISPR has been around for eons. Literally, geological epochs. CRISPR sequences, after all, are used by bacteria to protect themselves from repeated viral infections. …