Has anyone else seen this study done by the US department of defense and the national institute of ageing?
The conclusion is that those veterans diagnosed as having PTSD were at a nearly 2 fold higher risk of developing dementia compared with those without PTSD.
The study is in the June 2010 issue of Archieves general psychiatry.com. I'm going to Veteran Affairs Canada with this study to see if I can get them to cover his medications and other needs for dementia.
The brain is such a mystery for science at this moment in time. A lecture I heard on AD described how the brain has a immune system that is different from the rest of the body. The researcher said his studies were looking at the Amyloid plaques as antibodies that are created or released in response to injury or stress.
Two people both exposed to similar horrible stressful situations, one develops PTSD the other does not. WHY? Perhaps in the PTSD person, the experience somehow created a physical damage, damage that created an injury leading to an immune response that lead to plaque development. . . . . It may be a cause similar to dementia in persons with head injuries (boxers & football players)
Then again how many of us have dementia spouses who have never have experienced an injury or severe stress??
A problem that is standing in the way of a lot of research and understanding is that science does not have a mouse that develops Tau tangles(!) We have research mice that grow amyloid plaques (and therefore have AD symptoms) but none that recreate the tau tangles.
Does the damage of Tau tangles lead to a amyloid response or does amyloid accumulation destroy the tau? But this DOES explain how and why so much research and drugs are developed and researched to reduce of eliminate the plaques and nobody is really looking at the tau . . . .