The life of the brain: The promise of restoration

Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professinals,

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care professionals to get an easyceu or two

Here are more interesting dementia brain boosting activities





Get your subscription to Activity Director Today's e magazine" />

thestar.com

We now know that even old people continue to create new brain cells. But these new neurons die off as we age. Scientists may be on the brink of discovering a compound to prevent brain cell death, offering the promise of treatment for Alzheimer's.

DALLAS—Dr. Andrew Pieper isn't sure how many hours he spent in room K3.406, a windowless space not much bigger than a broom closet, except that it all amounted to “quite a lot of time.”

This, it turns out, translates into many visits per week over the course of three years, enough to peer through a microscope at roughly 27,000 very thin sections of the brains of lab mice.

Or, to be precise, the so-called dentate gyrus in the hippocampus region of their brains.

The hippocampus is associated with memory, and the dentate gyrus is one part of the brain that generates new neurons, or nerve cells — the little building blocks that get wired into the mind's complicated circuitry.

Pieper, a biochemist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, had the “very tedious” task of detecting those new neurons, employing a series of antibodies to help amplify their telltale signal.

He found a great many nascent neurons, and this is very good news.