Research is starting to show that Alzheimer’s may be prevented with the right lifestyle choices. The good news is, the same strategies that keep diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers at bay may also play a role in reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s.
Month: July 2017
Alzheimer’s: Clinical Trials – Should You Assist In Research?
Advances in the treatment of Alzheimer’s could not be achieved without the help of investigators. But the research wouldn’t be possible without the participation of important people: the patients.
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Americans Rank Alzheimer’s as Most Feared Disease
Home Instead Senior Care®, the world’s leading provider of home care services for seniors, today announced new survey results revealing that Americans fear developing Alzheimer’s disease more than any other major life-threatening disease, including cancer, stroke, heart disease and diabetes.
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Signs of Alzheimer’s at an Early Age
Scientists studying Alzheimer’s disease are increasingly finding clues that the brain begins to deteriorate years before a person shows symptoms of dementia.
Now, research on a large extended family of 5,000 people in Colombia with a genetically driven form of Alzheimer’s has found evidence that the precursors of the disease begin even earlier than previously thought and that this early brain deterioration occurs in more ways than has been documented before.
Dyslexia: Who are Dyslexics?
Dyslexia is a word that is often used for poor reading ability. The word has its origins in Latin and Greek: “dys”, as in dysfunction, meaning “difficult”, and “lexis” meaning “speech” or “word”. Thus, it is a useful word for describing a very specific reading difficulty. Poor reading is too broad and too vague a term and could be reflective of a number of factors including those associated with poor environmental conditions such as malnutrition, disease, widespread illiteracy, or poor schooling and instruction.
Dyslexia: How do Children Learn to Read?
Learning to read is the most important task that children face during the first year of school. Whereas speaking is natural and develops naturally for most children, reading has to be taught. In spite of good instruction, however, many children fail to learn to read by the end of their first year in school. Many reasons are given to explain why they fail.
Dyslexia: How to Recognize Dyslexia? How Common is it?
The answer to this question varies widely, depending on how we define dyslexia and how we identify it in a child. Estimates of the occurrence of general reading disabilities in elementary school range from 10 percent to 20 percent, but dyslexia as a true defect in the intellectual makeup of the child may be as low as 2 percent. Far more boys are dyslexic, as compared to girls. There are several possible reasons for this:
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Dyslexia: How Do Good Readers Read?
Good Readers Read by Sight and Sound
Who are the good readers then? Most children, about 85 percent, learn to read with relative ease through proper instruction. The stages of reading begin with children reading short words as though they were pictures, that is, they are not aware of the relationship between the letters or syllables and their sound. A word such as bath may be visually similar to the word bat. A child who reads the whole word as though it is a picture may not be able to distinguish between them.
Dyslexia: ‘Garden Variety’ Poor Readers
It is recognized that there are two types of poor readers—Garden Variety and Dyslexic. ‘Garden-variety’ poor readers show intellectual or cognitive processing problems in many areas, and not only in putting things in sequence as already discussed. They may also experience problems in seeing relationships among words, objects or pictures, in sustaining attention, and/or in the ability to organize and plan ahead.
Dyslexia: Phonological Awareness can Predict Reading Skill
Children first learn words by listening to them and only later by reading them. Listening discrimination, that is, accurate discrimination between two similar sounding words is learnt through day-to-day experience. We have observed, for example, that children as young as three who grow up in an English-speaking environment, but in a household where the parents’ mother tongue is not English, soon begin to correct their parents’ English diction. While children acquire a foreign language very easily, it is not the same with parents, who may be unable to reproduce words exactly as they are spoken by the native speakers of that language.
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