Helping the Brain Help Itself keynote by Mark Mattson
Now, for the second keynote at American College of Nutrition conference in New York City we're listening to Mark Mattson, Ph.D. He starts out talking about his work in the laboratory of neurosciences at National Institutes of Aging. He talks about what happens during aging in the brain. More and more as people get older, neurons age and die, predisposing us to Alzheimer's and other brain diseases. The mechanisms on how this happens are being shown and he discusses the different pathways. Dietary energy restriction, exercise, cognitive enrichment promote neuroprotection (hormesis?) by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation. Current trends in Alzheimer's showing it's a huge issue that's not being dealt with. We need a war on it like we have on cancer. Many people die from Alzheimer's and it's a tax on society. He discusses amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (with tau) that is involved in AD pathogenesis. There's a number of animal models for ...