Alzheimer’s patient-advocate George Vradenburg and Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner call for greater attention to be paid to the magnitude of Alzheimer’s disease in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal (3/17, Subscription Publication). Citing the example of President Ronald Reagan, who died from the disease but whose death certificate lists “pneumonia” as the cause of death, the authors argue that the true death toll of the disease is six times higher than officially reported.

The CDC uses official causes of death in calculating that Alzheimer’s kills 84,000 people per year. However, a recent study in the journal Neurology estimates the real number could be greater than half-a-million, which would rival the number of deaths from cancer. However, while Congress provides $5.7 billion annually to cancer research, Alzheimer’s only receives $550 million. The authors call for both greater funding and greater attention to the widespread killer.

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— “Alzheimer’s and Its Uncounted Victims,” George Vradenburg, Wall Street Journal, March , 2014.

HealthDay (3/15, Preidt) reported that according to research presented at the American Psychosomatic Society’s annual meeting, “stressful events can have an almost immediate impact on children’s health and well-being.” After analyzing data on some 96,000 US children, researchers also found that youngsters “who experienced three or more stressful events were six times more likely to have physical or mental health problems or a learning disorder than those who had no stressful experiences.”

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— “Stress Can Quickly Harm Kids’ Health: Study,” Robert Preidt, HaelthDay, March 14, 2014.

HealthDay (3/14, Norton) reports that according to a study published March 13 in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, “environmental pollution might be contributing to autism risk, although the specific culprit toxins remain unknown.” After analyzing “nearly 100 million US health insurance claims,” researchers “found a correlation between US counties’ autism rates and their rates of genital birth defects in boys, which could be a sign of some common environmental contributors.”

MedPage Today (3/14, Raeburn) reports the investigators also “used male congenital malformations as a surrogate for parental exposures to environmental insults – including pesticides, lead, sex hormone analogs, medication, and plasticizers, among others – which are believed to play a role in the causation of” autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID). The study authors concluded, “Adjusted for gender, ethnic, socioeconomic, and geopolitical factors, the ASD incidence rates were strongly linked to population-normalized rates of congenital malformations of the reproductive system in males – an increase in ASD incidence of 283% for every percent increase in incidence of malformations (95% CI 91-576, P<6 x 10⁻⁵).” The study received financial support from the National Institutes of Health. Related Links:

— “More Evidence Environmental Exposures Contribute to Autism,” Amy Norton, HealthDay, March 13, 2014.

n an editorial, the New York Times (3/13, A26, Subscription Publication) points out that a study published in the journal Neurology “has suggested that Alzheimer’s disease causes six times as many deaths as the official statistics would indicate,” catapulting the disease “from the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States to the third, behind heart disease and cancer.” The Times concludes that an aging population, coupled with the economic burden of Alzheimer’s, make “it imperative to intensify research into ways to treat and prevent the disease.”

Related Links:

— “High Mortality From Alzheimer’s Disease,” New York Times, March 12, 2014.

Reuters (3/13, Raven) reports a recent review of past studies published in the British Medical Journal indicates former smokers tend to benefit from an improved mood after quitting, while improvements in mental health were also apparent. Researchers analyzed data from 26 smoking cessation studies comparing patients’ mental health before they quit with their health six months later, People who quit experienced less anxiety, depression and stress as well as psychological quality of life improvements.

Related Links:

— “Quitting smoking linked to improved mood,” Kathleen Raven, Reuters, March 12, 2014