My father suffered from the disease and passed away in October. Awful disease. This is great news, but it looks like any treatment based on this will still be quite some way off.
When I was young this disease shaped my perception of old age.
Got my self tested (23andme) 5 years ago and luckily I don't seem to have any predispositions for it.
> but it looks like any treatment
> based on this will still be
> quite some way off
Problem 2- can you actually make an antibiotic specifically target one bacteria only?
My grandfather survived a few cancer appearances but during the last surgery to remove some cancer lumps he woke up as a completely new person. It seems the anesthesia triggered the first signs of Parkinson's and dementia exactly at the same time. He was pretty "normal" before the surgery but after it he couldn't walk and thought the hospital staff attacked him with dogs during the night. Fortunately (?) he didn't last long after that day but still had time to be kicked off from his home by my grandmother who couldn't handle the dementia.
Sorry for the rant, I'm obviously not over it, will never be. Dementia is the worst thing I've ever witnessed.
Apparently delirium is a common side effect of whatever they do in hospitals. I came across this link last month:
"Delirium: A Surprising Side Effect of Hospital Stays -- Often misdiagnosed as dementia, it can cause hallucinations and delusions" - http://www.nextavenue.org/delirium-a-surprising-side-effect-...
If you're lucky they'll feed you coconut oil (short saturated fatty acids are easily burned in the cells for energy) and the dementia will pass. If you're not lucky they'll give you "anti-psychotic" drugs to sedate you, or other interventions that ruin the metabolism. Many treatments have the side effect of ensuring the patient will never recover.
Coconut oil is useful because of its high proportion of medium chain triglicerides. Longer fatty acids have to be transported with carnitine to be metabolized in the mitochondria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-chain_triglyceride#Medi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_metabolism#Fatty_ac...
The alcoholic brain tends to be insulin resistant, and uses acetate (a breakdown product of ethanol) as fuel, because glucose isn't available, or isn't can't be delivered to the mitochondria in sufficient quantity.
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Thus, without careful assessment and history, delirium can easily be confused
with a number of psychiatric disorders or long term organic brain syndromes,
because many of the signs and symptoms of delirium are conditions also present
in dementia, depression, and psychosis.
However, I'd personal take the intermittent low level psychosis any day if it meant retaining my brain, retaining 'me', for just a bit longer.
Also yeah, as stated elsewhere: Parkinson's + anti-psychotic meds == dangerous and egregious medical malpractice. Anti-psychotics are basically an anti-cute for Parkinson's, given the generally work by attenuating dopamine prevalence in various synaptic clefts.
Parkinson's kinda sucks that way: I'd say about a third of the people I know with the diagnosis re people I would have been able to point to from across the street and say, "that fellow has Parkinson's." The rest have a presentation that doesn't look much like the textbook, but we have a few things in common if you look deeply enough. Frankly, though, there's a lot of diagnosis by elimination and medication.
Parkinsonism is watching yourself die with full knowledge of what's happening to you and a complete inability to do anything about it. My mother had polio as a child as well, so she's trying to learn to walk for the third time.
There is no fate I find more horrifying on a personal level. None.