The Minority Report

This is great research for Alzheimers. This reminds me of the research on mental illnesses with the Amish. Relatively closed societies with a smaller number of environmental factors to rule out. It’s cool!

Plus they get to keep the brains in jars!

The Nun Study, as it’s called, has tracked the cognitive abilities and motor functions of more than 600 nuns over the past two decades and continues to study the donated brains as they’ve passed on.

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The nuns make for a very unique population to study, he said, because of their similar lifestyles.

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Among the study’s findings are a relationship between early childhood education and reducing the susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease, he said. They also found a relationship between traumas to the brain, such as strokes, and an increased susceptibility to Alzheimer’s.

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Another interesting finding has been that some of the nuns brains look like they have Alzheimer’s, Barclay said, but the women weren’t exhibiting symptoms before they died.

“If that’s the case, there may be things you can do, even though you have the disease to slow down or prevent the expression of the disease symptoms,” Barclay said.

Major advances in Alzheimer’s research since the Nun Study began mean researchers now know what dementia looks like in the brain.
Nun brains assist in dementia research | mndaily.com – Serving the University of Minnesota Since 1900