The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (New Book)

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-- 'Books Forum' blog
-- 'Health Studies' blog


Greetings,

Here is a new book for discussion:

The Myth of Alzheimer's:
What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis
by Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
(Hardcover - Jan 8, 2008)

Book Description provided by the Publisher (St. Martin's Press):

Dr. Peter Whitehouse will transform the way we think about Alzheimer's disease. In this provocative and ground-breaking book he challenges the conventional wisdom about memory loss and cognitive impairment; questions the current treatment for Alzheimer's disease; and provides a new approach to understanding and rethinking everything we thought we knew about brain aging. The Myth of Alzheimer's provides welcome answers to the questions that millions of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease - and their families - are eager to know:

-- Is Alzheimer's a disease?
-- What is the difference between a naturally aging brain and an Alzheimer's brain?
-- How effective are the current drugs for AD? Are they worth the money we spend on them?
-- What kind of hope does science really have for the treatment of memory loss? And are there alternative interventions that can keep our aging bodies and minds sharp?
-- What promise does genomic research actually hold?
-- What would a world without Alzheimer's look like, and how do we as individuals and as human communities get there?

Backed up by research, full of practical advice and information, and infused with hope, THE MYTH OF ALZHEIMER'S will liberate us from this crippling label, teach us how to best approach memory loss, and explain how to stave off some of the normal effects of aging. Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D., one of the best known Alzheimer's experts in the world, specializes in neurology with an interest in geriatrics and cognitive science and a focus on dementia. He is the founder of the University Alzheimer Center (now the University Memory and Aging Center) at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University where he has held professorships in the neurology, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, organizational behavior, bioethics, cognitive science, nursing, and history. He is also currently a practicing geriatric neurologist. With his wife, Catherine, he founded The Intergenerational School, an award winning, internationally recognized public school committed to enhancing lifelong cognitive vitality. Daniel George, MSc, is a research collaborator with Dr. Whitehouse at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Medical Anthropology at Oxford University in England.

'I don't have a magic bullet to prevent your brain from getting older, and so I don't claim to have the cure for AD; but I do offer a powerful therapy - a new narrative for approaching brain aging that undercuts the destructive myth we tell today. Most of our knowledge and our thinking is organized in story form, and thus stories offer us the chief means of making sense of the present, looking into the future, and planning and creating our lives. New approaches to brain aging require new stories that can move us beyond the myth of Alzheimer's disease and towards improved quality of life for all aging persons in our society.It is in this book that your new story can begin.' - Peter Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D.

Key words:
New books, Myth of Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's, Peter Whitehouse, Daniel George, St. Martin's Press, memory loss, cognitive impairment, brain aging, neurology, geriatrics, cognitive science, dementia, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, organizational behavior, bioethics, nursing

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Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

See also:
-- 'Books Forum' blog
-- 'Health Studies' blog


Greetings,

Here is a book for discussion:

Ending Aging:
The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae (Hardcover - Sep 4, 2007)

Book Description provided by the Publisher (St. Martin's Press):

MUST WE AGE? A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity's greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging. Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely-technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future-is now within reach. In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology.

They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine's fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.


From the Back Cover:

People alive today could live to be a thousand years old

“His clarion call to action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future.”
­Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and author of How We Die and The Art of Aging

“Seems to me this man could be put in jail with reasonable cause.”
­Dr. Martin Raff, emeritus professor of biology at University College London and coauthor of Molecular Biology of the Cell

A leading researcher sketches the real “fountain of youth”

- The most realistic way to combat aging is to rejuvenate the body at the molecular and cellular level, removing accumulated damage and restoring us to a biologically younger state.

- Comprehensive rejuvenation therapies can feasibly postpone age-related frailty and disease indefinitely, greatly extending our lives while eliminating, rather than lengthening, the period of late-life frailty and debilitation.

- A comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies could probably be validated in laboratory mice within a decade. We would then have a good chance of developing it for human use only a decade or two thereafter.

- Removing the causes of aging-related deaths will also eliminate all the suffering that aging inflicts on most people in the last years of their lives.

- Aging kills 100,000 people a day: old people, yes, but old people are people too. Social concerns about the effects of defeating aging are legitimate but don’t outweigh the merits of saving so many lives and alleviating so much suffering.

Key words:
New books, aging, ageing, longevity, gerontology, gerontological, geriatrics, geriatric, senescence, anti-aging, anti-ageing, rejuvenation, life-extension, immortality, Ending Aging, Rejuvenation Breakthroughs, Reverse Human Aging, Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae, St. Martin's Press

Do you have any comments on this new book?
Post them below by clicking here!

Home:
Longevity Science Blog
and
Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
Shorter weblink:
http://tinyurl.com/2psceq


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