New hope for patients with Alzheimer's: How one family is fighting the disease

*This article originally appeared on Today.com Like his mother Virginia O'Brien before him, Greg O’Brien is battling Alzheimer’s disease with all his might. O'Brien's mother did everything she could to stave off the disease as she cared for her cancer-stricken, wheelchair-bound husband. And she did somehow manage to keep things going until her husband, O'Brien's father, died from prostate cancer. It was from watching his mother live with Alzheimer’s that allowed O'Brien to recognize the signs in himself and prompted him to see a neurologist at age 59. Brain scans that revealed he had Alzheimer’s, too. Shortly after his own

Forming Your “Circle of Help”

The best way to defeat Alzheimer’s is to come together and gang up on the disease.

Growing Our Voices: Let’s Talk About Dementia

1994: President Ronald Reagan penned his now famous letter to the American public announcing that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The same year, m y dad , at 81, had just been diagnosed with “memory problems”; my son Mike was a sophomore in high school; and I was three years into a new marriage and at the top of my Human Resources career. Three years later my husband Richard, at 57, was diagnosed with Mild C ognitive I mpairment . Dad died in 2001 from what I later learned was vascular dementia and Richard in 2012

“A Devil of a Disease”: The Current Alzheimer’s Pipeline

This article was originally published by BioSpace on August 7, 2019. By Mark Terry As anyone following Alzheimer’s research knows, drug development for the disease has been a wasteland of failed clinical trials with literally billions of dollars thrown at drugs that have proved ineffective at preventing or halting the disease. In March 2019, in what many felt was a turning point for the industry, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Biogen and its collaboration partner, Tokyo-based Eisai, announced they were discontinuing the global Phase III clinical trials, ENGAGE and EMERGE, of aducanumab in patients with mild cognitive impairment from Alzheimer’s and mild Alzheimer’s

My Birthday Wish

My name is Andres Martin and this week I turned 32 years old. I’m a proud father, husband, and veteran. Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to recognize how precious my birthdays are. My military service has taught me this, the birth of my daughter has taught me this, and my genes have taught me this. You see my family is from a region in Mexico that is host to the “Jalisco mutation,” a mutation which guarantees carriers will develop early-onset Alzheimer’s, and one for which I recently tested positive. My diagnosis answered a lot of questions. It