Date: 11/25/2008
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
Associated Press Writer
CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) _ The state is investigating the death of a 28-year-old woman who had dwindled to 43 pounds in a state-licensed home for developmentally disabled adults, officials said Tuesday.
The Division of Developmental Disabilities caseworker responsible for keeping tabs on the woman has been suspended and state workers are checking on the well-being of all 1,255 residents of similar homes, the officials said.
Tara O’Leary was removed on Sept. 11 from a central New Jersey home where she lived along with two other developmentally disabled adults, said Tom Fitzsimmons, an aide to state Sen. Jennifer Beck.
The next day, the Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s Office started a criminal investigation and the Department of Human Services opened its own investigation, said department spokeswoman Pam Ronan.
State officials said the woman died Nov. 10. They would not say where she died.
Ronan said the woman had a complicated medical history, but that the state could not release specifics because of state and federal patient privacy laws and because of the investigation.
She said the state is looking into whether the caseworker was making monthly visits to the home.
“This death is unacceptable on many levels, and we’re doing all we can to scrutinize every aspect and prevent tragedies such as this from occurring again,” said Jennifer Velez, the state Human Services commissioner.
The case is similar to one in 2003, when four children weighing less than 45 pounds each were removed from a state-run foster home in Collingswood. The boys all survived, but the case brought deep disgrace to the state Division of Human Services and its Division of Children and Family Services.
The state has about 600 licensed community care residences, which operate much like foster homes and serve developmentally disabled adults.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Nap without guilt: It boosts sophisticated memory
Date: 11/24/2008
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Just in time for the holidays, some medical advice most people will like: Take a nap.
Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, compelling new research suggests. But on the flip side, taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.
“Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember,” is how Dr. William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week.
Good sleep is a casualty of our 24/7 world. Surveys suggest few adults attain the recommended seven to eight hours a night.
Way too little clearly is dangerous: Sleep deprivation causes not just car crashes but all sorts of other accidents. Over time, a chronic lack of sleep can erode the body in ways that leave us more vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses.
But perhaps more common than insomnia is fragmented sleep — the easy awakening that comes with aging, or, worse, the sleep apnea that afflicts millions, who quit breathing for 30 seconds or so over and over throughout the night.
Indeed, scientists increasingly are focusing less on sleep duration and more on the quality of sleep, what’s called sleep intensity, in studying how sleep helps the brain process memories so they stick. Particularly important is “slow-wave sleep,” a period of very deep sleep that comes earlier than better-known REM sleep, or dreaming time.
Fishbein suspected a more active role for the slow-wave sleep that can emerge even in a power nap. Maybe our brains keep working during that time to solve problems and come up with new ideas. So he and graduate student Hiuyan Lau devised a simple test: documenting relational memory, where the brain puts together separately learned facts in new ways.
First, they taught 20 English-speaking college students lists of Chinese words spelled with two characters — such as sister, mother, maid. Then half the students took a nap, being monitored to be sure they didn’t move from slow-wave sleep into the REM stage.
Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they’d never seen before. The nappers did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they’d memorized earlier always meant the same thing — female, for example. So they also were more likely than non-nappers to choose that a new word containing that character meant “princess” and not “ape.”
“The nap group has essentially teased out what’s going on,” Fishbein concludes.
These students took a 90-minute nap, quite a luxury for most adults. But even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory, adds Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.
Conversely, Wisconsin researchers briefly interrupted nighttime slow-wave sleep by playing a beep — just loudly enough to disturb sleep but not awaken — and found those people couldn’t remember a task they’d learned the day before as well as people whose slow-wave sleep wasn’t disrupted.
That brings us back to fragmented sleep, whether from aging or apnea. It can suppress the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus, where memory-making begins — enough to hinder learning weeks after sleep returns to normal, warns Dr. Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles.
To prove a lasting effect, McGinty mimicked human sleep apnea in rats. He hooked them to brain monitors and made them sleep on a treadmill. Whenever the monitors detected 30 seconds of sleep, the treadmill briefly switched on. After 12 days of this sleep disturbance, McGinty let the rats sleep peacefully for as long as they wanted for the next two weeks.
The catch-up sleep didn’t help: Rested rats used room cues to quickly learn the escape hole in a maze. Those with fragmented sleep two weeks earlier couldn’t, only randomly stumbling upon the escape.
None of the new work is enough, yet, to pinpoint the minimum sleep needed for optimal memory. What’s needed may vary considerably from person to person.
“A short sleeper may have a very efficient deep sleep even if they sleep only four hours,” notes Dr. Chiara Cirellia of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
But altogether, the findings do suggest some practical advice: Get apnea treated. Avoid what Harvard’s Stickgold calls “sleep bulimia,” super-late nights followed by sleep-in weekends. And don’t feel guilty for napping.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Just in time for the holidays, some medical advice most people will like: Take a nap.
Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, compelling new research suggests. But on the flip side, taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.
“Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember,” is how Dr. William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week.
Good sleep is a casualty of our 24/7 world. Surveys suggest few adults attain the recommended seven to eight hours a night.
Way too little clearly is dangerous: Sleep deprivation causes not just car crashes but all sorts of other accidents. Over time, a chronic lack of sleep can erode the body in ways that leave us more vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses.
But perhaps more common than insomnia is fragmented sleep — the easy awakening that comes with aging, or, worse, the sleep apnea that afflicts millions, who quit breathing for 30 seconds or so over and over throughout the night.
Indeed, scientists increasingly are focusing less on sleep duration and more on the quality of sleep, what’s called sleep intensity, in studying how sleep helps the brain process memories so they stick. Particularly important is “slow-wave sleep,” a period of very deep sleep that comes earlier than better-known REM sleep, or dreaming time.
Fishbein suspected a more active role for the slow-wave sleep that can emerge even in a power nap. Maybe our brains keep working during that time to solve problems and come up with new ideas. So he and graduate student Hiuyan Lau devised a simple test: documenting relational memory, where the brain puts together separately learned facts in new ways.
First, they taught 20 English-speaking college students lists of Chinese words spelled with two characters — such as sister, mother, maid. Then half the students took a nap, being monitored to be sure they didn’t move from slow-wave sleep into the REM stage.
Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they’d never seen before. The nappers did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they’d memorized earlier always meant the same thing — female, for example. So they also were more likely than non-nappers to choose that a new word containing that character meant “princess” and not “ape.”
“The nap group has essentially teased out what’s going on,” Fishbein concludes.
These students took a 90-minute nap, quite a luxury for most adults. But even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory, adds Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.
Conversely, Wisconsin researchers briefly interrupted nighttime slow-wave sleep by playing a beep — just loudly enough to disturb sleep but not awaken — and found those people couldn’t remember a task they’d learned the day before as well as people whose slow-wave sleep wasn’t disrupted.
That brings us back to fragmented sleep, whether from aging or apnea. It can suppress the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus, where memory-making begins — enough to hinder learning weeks after sleep returns to normal, warns Dr. Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles.
To prove a lasting effect, McGinty mimicked human sleep apnea in rats. He hooked them to brain monitors and made them sleep on a treadmill. Whenever the monitors detected 30 seconds of sleep, the treadmill briefly switched on. After 12 days of this sleep disturbance, McGinty let the rats sleep peacefully for as long as they wanted for the next two weeks.
The catch-up sleep didn’t help: Rested rats used room cues to quickly learn the escape hole in a maze. Those with fragmented sleep two weeks earlier couldn’t, only randomly stumbling upon the escape.
None of the new work is enough, yet, to pinpoint the minimum sleep needed for optimal memory. What’s needed may vary considerably from person to person.
“A short sleeper may have a very efficient deep sleep even if they sleep only four hours,” notes Dr. Chiara Cirellia of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
But altogether, the findings do suggest some practical advice: Get apnea treated. Avoid what Harvard’s Stickgold calls “sleep bulimia,” super-late nights followed by sleep-in weekends. And don’t feel guilty for napping.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Man denies hitting brain-injured stepdaughter
Date: 11/21/2008
Associated Press Writer
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) _ A man accused of beating his stepdaughter so severely that she suffered a permanent brain injury — triggering a right-to-die case — testified Friday that he never hit her and believed his wife’s claims that the girl injured herself.
Jason Strickland denied prosecutors’ claims that he and his late wife, Holli, beat 11-year-old Haleigh Poutre into a coma in September 2005.
Haleigh was at the center of the right-to-die debate after the state received court permission to remove her feeding tube. But she began showing signs of improvement days later and can now perform simple tasks such as feeding herself and writing her name. She remains in a Boston rehabilitation hospital.
Strickland, 34, portrayed Haleigh as a troubled child who was once admitted to the hospital for an eating disorder. He said she had a habit of biting the side of her mouth until it bled and that her nose was “typically red” from continually picking at an old scab.
Strickland testified that his wife told him repeatedly over a five-year period that Haleigh caused a litany of injuries, including bruises, burns and cuts to various parts of her body.
He said that during the year before Haleigh suffered her near-fatal brain injury, Holli Strickland was taking her to see a nurse practitioner on a weekly basis to perform body checks “because Haleigh was hurting herself.”
Strickland said when he noticed bruises or other marks on Haleigh, his wife told him the girl hurt herself.
“Most of the time, Holli would explain to me what happened,” Strickland said.
He recalled one time when Haleigh had a badly bruised and swollen foot, with bloody toenails.
“What did Holli tell you?” Black asked.
“That she was dropping a bowling ball on her foot,” Strickland replied.
Jason Strickland is the only person to stand trial for Haleigh’s injuries. Holli Strickland died in an apparent murder-suicide with her grandmother after she and Jason were charged in the 2005 beating. Haleigh was adopted at age 7 by Holli, her aunt.
Strickland, who married Holli in 2002, said he never hit Haleigh or her younger sister, Samantha, but acknowledged giving each girl an occasional “tap” on the back of the head “to get her attention.”
“But never in a disciplinary fashion,” he said.
Earlier in the trial, Samantha Poutre, now 12, testified that she saw Jason Strickland push Haleigh down the stairs the day she suffered the brain injury. But Samantha, who was 9 at the time, pointed to the wrong man when asked to identify Strickland in the courtroom.
Haleigh was comatose and on life support for several months. After doctors said she had no hope of recovery, the state Department of Social Services got court permission to withdraw her feeding tube. Days later, Haleigh began to show signs of improvement.
The state was criticized for moving too quickly, and the case helped spark an overhaul of Massachusetts’ child welfare system, including the creation of a new Office of the Child Advocate.
The state also was denounced for failing to protect Haleigh in the years before she was hospitalized.
Records showed the state had received more than a dozen complaints about cuts and other marks seen on Haleigh between 2001 and 2005. But the agency determined the girl’s injuries were self-inflicted and did not remove her from the Strickland home in Westfield.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Associated Press Writer
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) _ A man accused of beating his stepdaughter so severely that she suffered a permanent brain injury — triggering a right-to-die case — testified Friday that he never hit her and believed his wife’s claims that the girl injured herself.
Jason Strickland denied prosecutors’ claims that he and his late wife, Holli, beat 11-year-old Haleigh Poutre into a coma in September 2005.
Haleigh was at the center of the right-to-die debate after the state received court permission to remove her feeding tube. But she began showing signs of improvement days later and can now perform simple tasks such as feeding herself and writing her name. She remains in a Boston rehabilitation hospital.
Strickland, 34, portrayed Haleigh as a troubled child who was once admitted to the hospital for an eating disorder. He said she had a habit of biting the side of her mouth until it bled and that her nose was “typically red” from continually picking at an old scab.
Strickland testified that his wife told him repeatedly over a five-year period that Haleigh caused a litany of injuries, including bruises, burns and cuts to various parts of her body.
He said that during the year before Haleigh suffered her near-fatal brain injury, Holli Strickland was taking her to see a nurse practitioner on a weekly basis to perform body checks “because Haleigh was hurting herself.”
Strickland said when he noticed bruises or other marks on Haleigh, his wife told him the girl hurt herself.
“Most of the time, Holli would explain to me what happened,” Strickland said.
He recalled one time when Haleigh had a badly bruised and swollen foot, with bloody toenails.
“What did Holli tell you?” Black asked.
“That she was dropping a bowling ball on her foot,” Strickland replied.
Jason Strickland is the only person to stand trial for Haleigh’s injuries. Holli Strickland died in an apparent murder-suicide with her grandmother after she and Jason were charged in the 2005 beating. Haleigh was adopted at age 7 by Holli, her aunt.
Strickland, who married Holli in 2002, said he never hit Haleigh or her younger sister, Samantha, but acknowledged giving each girl an occasional “tap” on the back of the head “to get her attention.”
“But never in a disciplinary fashion,” he said.
Earlier in the trial, Samantha Poutre, now 12, testified that she saw Jason Strickland push Haleigh down the stairs the day she suffered the brain injury. But Samantha, who was 9 at the time, pointed to the wrong man when asked to identify Strickland in the courtroom.
Haleigh was comatose and on life support for several months. After doctors said she had no hope of recovery, the state Department of Social Services got court permission to withdraw her feeding tube. Days later, Haleigh began to show signs of improvement.
The state was criticized for moving too quickly, and the case helped spark an overhaul of Massachusetts’ child welfare system, including the creation of a new Office of the Child Advocate.
The state also was denounced for failing to protect Haleigh in the years before she was hospitalized.
Records showed the state had received more than a dozen complaints about cuts and other marks seen on Haleigh between 2001 and 2005. But the agency determined the girl’s injuries were self-inflicted and did not remove her from the Strickland home in Westfield.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Prosecution rests in case of brain-injured girl
Date: 11/20/2008
By DENISE LAVOIE
Associated Press Writer
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) _ Prosecutors wrapped up their case Wednesday against a man accused of beating his stepdaughter into a coma, triggering a right-to-die case that was resolved when the girl began to recover.
Jason Strickland, a 34-year-old auto mechanic, is charged with abusing his stepdaughter, Haleigh Poutre, in 2005, when she was 11. Prosecutors say Strickland and his late wife, Holli, participated in abuse that culminated in a beating on Sept. 10, 2005, that left her with a severe brain injury.
Strickland is expected to take the stand in his own defense after his lawyers begin presenting their case Thursday.
His lawyer has told the jury Strickland believed his wife’s claims that Haleigh suffered from a psychological disorder that caused her to injure herself.
Dr. Christine Barron, a forensic pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, R.I., testified Wednesday that she believes the injuries shown in photographs taken after the girl was brought to the hospital the day after the severe beating could not have been self-inflicted.
Barron reviewed photographs showing extensive bruising, lacerations and abrasions on Haleigh’s legs, chest, back and arms.
Barron said bruising on her left ankle and left wrist were consistent with a “restraint injury.” She also said lesions on the top of her left foot and upper left arm were consistent with a “non-accidental cigarette burn.”
Under cross-examination from Strickland’s attorney, Alan Black, Barron acknowledged that a nurse practitioner who saw Haleigh on a regular basis in 2005 characterized the abrasions and bruises on Haleigh’s body as self-inflicted injuries.
Days after child welfare officials received court permission to remove her feeding tube, Haleigh began showing signs of improvement. The state was criticized for failing to protect Haleigh and for moving too quickly to remove her life support, and the case sparked an overhaul of the child welfare system.
Holli Strickland, who was Haleigh’s aunt but who adopted the girl at age 7, died in an apparent murder-suicide with her grandmother after she was charged in Haleigh’s beating.
Haleigh, now 14, has improved to the point where she can feed herself and write her name. She now lives in a rehabilitation hospital.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By DENISE LAVOIE
Associated Press Writer
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) _ Prosecutors wrapped up their case Wednesday against a man accused of beating his stepdaughter into a coma, triggering a right-to-die case that was resolved when the girl began to recover.
Jason Strickland, a 34-year-old auto mechanic, is charged with abusing his stepdaughter, Haleigh Poutre, in 2005, when she was 11. Prosecutors say Strickland and his late wife, Holli, participated in abuse that culminated in a beating on Sept. 10, 2005, that left her with a severe brain injury.
Strickland is expected to take the stand in his own defense after his lawyers begin presenting their case Thursday.
His lawyer has told the jury Strickland believed his wife’s claims that Haleigh suffered from a psychological disorder that caused her to injure herself.
Dr. Christine Barron, a forensic pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, R.I., testified Wednesday that she believes the injuries shown in photographs taken after the girl was brought to the hospital the day after the severe beating could not have been self-inflicted.
Barron reviewed photographs showing extensive bruising, lacerations and abrasions on Haleigh’s legs, chest, back and arms.
Barron said bruising on her left ankle and left wrist were consistent with a “restraint injury.” She also said lesions on the top of her left foot and upper left arm were consistent with a “non-accidental cigarette burn.”
Under cross-examination from Strickland’s attorney, Alan Black, Barron acknowledged that a nurse practitioner who saw Haleigh on a regular basis in 2005 characterized the abrasions and bruises on Haleigh’s body as self-inflicted injuries.
Days after child welfare officials received court permission to remove her feeding tube, Haleigh began showing signs of improvement. The state was criticized for failing to protect Haleigh and for moving too quickly to remove her life support, and the case sparked an overhaul of the child welfare system.
Holli Strickland, who was Haleigh’s aunt but who adopted the girl at age 7, died in an apparent murder-suicide with her grandmother after she was charged in Haleigh’s beating.
Haleigh, now 14, has improved to the point where she can feed herself and write her name. She now lives in a rehabilitation hospital.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
‘Mind spa’: This is your brain on exercise
Date: 11/19/2008
By RASHA MADKOUR
Associated Press Writer
SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) _ Seniors in this retirement hotspot diligently packed the local Y, sweating to keep their bodies in shape. But after their workout, several couldn’t remember where they put their car keys.
Watching this scenario unfold, neurotherapist George Rozelle thought: Wouldn’t it be great to have a health club where people could keep their brains fit? And so it was born: the Neurobics Club.
The center uses computer programs and other gadgets that stimulate the brain to help those who feel they aren’t as sharp as they used to be, or, as Rozelle puts it, people who are understressing their brains. Some doctors are skeptical about such programs’ benefit and cost, but Rozelle isn’t deterred.
“The fun part of this field is that it’s growing rapidly. There’s a lot of interest now in healthy aging,” Rozelle says. “The baby boomers are getting older and they’re not liking it.”
Dr. David Loewenstein, a University of Miami brain disorders researcher, said there’s much interest in any therapies that could help keep aging brains quick. With 78 million baby boomers beginning to hit their 60s, “there’s a big market for these sort of things.”
“What do older adults have? There really isn’t any medicine right now that prevents Alzheimer’s disease … so anything that can help people with their cognition can be of tremendous interest,” he said.
Still, experts caution there isn’t a lot of proven science behind much of this stuff yet.
The U.S. market for home computer software aimed at brain fitness grew to $225 million in revenues in 2007, according to a SharpBrains report, up from an estimated $100 million in 2005. The research and advisory firm forecasts the market burgeoning to $2 billion by 2015.
Rozelle’s “spa” uses a variety of tools, from high-tech reclining chairs that simultaneously stimulate several senses to a dark, quiet flotation tank that shuts out any stimulation. These mimic the stress-relaxation routines familiar to athletes. Along the wall in one room are computer stations with programs that call on a host of cognitive skills, like memory, computation, decision-making and critical thinking. In another room, a chair reclines to a zero-gravity position, thought to evenly distribute a person’s blood pressure and take stress off the spine.
The Neurobics Club is housed at Rozelle’s clinical practice, the Mind Spa. After an initial consultation to develop a tailored training plan, clients can buy a $50 monthly membership and have unlimited use of the equipment. Since it opened in 2007, about 50 people have joined.
Among them is Genie Hindall, 66, who joined after her husband starting having problems with his short-term memory and executive functions. Hindall wanted to take some preventive steps with her own mental acuity, saying: “I feel like I’m having to do a lot of thinking for two people now.”
About once a week, the former educator makes the 55-mile roundtrip from her Englewood home to downtown Sarasota, where the Mind Spa is in a single-level brick office building along with a neurologist’s clinic and endoscopy center.
Hindall sits in front of a computer for 45 minutes, doing exercises like trying to remember sequences of numbers seven long. She then lies down on the neurowave chair for half an hour. She dons goggles that emit flashes of colored lights and headphones that play soothing music, as the chair rotates in figure eights, rocking her into a meditative state.
“There’s a calmness and everything seems to go out of my mind,” Hindall says. “I just look at that as my quiet time.”
Medical authorities say consumers should be aware that many brain-fitness activities cannot promise specific results.
“For a lot of these things, there’s not a broad-based demonstration that they’ll work, there’s a more general: ‘Exercise is good,’” says Dr. Carl Eisdorfer, a geriatric psychiatrist who heads the University of Miami’s Center on Aging. Research into cognitive rehabilitation is just beginning, Eisdorfer adds.
“I think we’re at the point now where we have to be cautious about how we approach it and not oversell the idea,” he said.
Rozelle agrees that more research into mental fitness needs to be done, but says there’s enough evidence out there now to support what he’s doing with the Neurobics Club.
“It’s well accepted that to establish brain plasticity and brain fitness, it’s important to stimulate the brain in many and novel ways, because the brain gets lazy, but it responds to new stimulation.”
Loewenstein goes back to the gym analogy in assessing the benefit of a place like the Neurobics Club, saying: “Could it be helpful for some people? Absolutely, because some people could never exercise their brains,” just as others won’t do any activity unless they’re at a fitness club.
“But on the other hand, are you getting something here that you couldn’t get on your own and not pay money?”
___
On the Net:
Mind Spa, www.mind-spas.com
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By RASHA MADKOUR
Associated Press Writer
SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) _ Seniors in this retirement hotspot diligently packed the local Y, sweating to keep their bodies in shape. But after their workout, several couldn’t remember where they put their car keys.
Watching this scenario unfold, neurotherapist George Rozelle thought: Wouldn’t it be great to have a health club where people could keep their brains fit? And so it was born: the Neurobics Club.
The center uses computer programs and other gadgets that stimulate the brain to help those who feel they aren’t as sharp as they used to be, or, as Rozelle puts it, people who are understressing their brains. Some doctors are skeptical about such programs’ benefit and cost, but Rozelle isn’t deterred.
“The fun part of this field is that it’s growing rapidly. There’s a lot of interest now in healthy aging,” Rozelle says. “The baby boomers are getting older and they’re not liking it.”
Dr. David Loewenstein, a University of Miami brain disorders researcher, said there’s much interest in any therapies that could help keep aging brains quick. With 78 million baby boomers beginning to hit their 60s, “there’s a big market for these sort of things.”
“What do older adults have? There really isn’t any medicine right now that prevents Alzheimer’s disease … so anything that can help people with their cognition can be of tremendous interest,” he said.
Still, experts caution there isn’t a lot of proven science behind much of this stuff yet.
The U.S. market for home computer software aimed at brain fitness grew to $225 million in revenues in 2007, according to a SharpBrains report, up from an estimated $100 million in 2005. The research and advisory firm forecasts the market burgeoning to $2 billion by 2015.
Rozelle’s “spa” uses a variety of tools, from high-tech reclining chairs that simultaneously stimulate several senses to a dark, quiet flotation tank that shuts out any stimulation. These mimic the stress-relaxation routines familiar to athletes. Along the wall in one room are computer stations with programs that call on a host of cognitive skills, like memory, computation, decision-making and critical thinking. In another room, a chair reclines to a zero-gravity position, thought to evenly distribute a person’s blood pressure and take stress off the spine.
The Neurobics Club is housed at Rozelle’s clinical practice, the Mind Spa. After an initial consultation to develop a tailored training plan, clients can buy a $50 monthly membership and have unlimited use of the equipment. Since it opened in 2007, about 50 people have joined.
Among them is Genie Hindall, 66, who joined after her husband starting having problems with his short-term memory and executive functions. Hindall wanted to take some preventive steps with her own mental acuity, saying: “I feel like I’m having to do a lot of thinking for two people now.”
About once a week, the former educator makes the 55-mile roundtrip from her Englewood home to downtown Sarasota, where the Mind Spa is in a single-level brick office building along with a neurologist’s clinic and endoscopy center.
Hindall sits in front of a computer for 45 minutes, doing exercises like trying to remember sequences of numbers seven long. She then lies down on the neurowave chair for half an hour. She dons goggles that emit flashes of colored lights and headphones that play soothing music, as the chair rotates in figure eights, rocking her into a meditative state.
“There’s a calmness and everything seems to go out of my mind,” Hindall says. “I just look at that as my quiet time.”
Medical authorities say consumers should be aware that many brain-fitness activities cannot promise specific results.
“For a lot of these things, there’s not a broad-based demonstration that they’ll work, there’s a more general: ‘Exercise is good,’” says Dr. Carl Eisdorfer, a geriatric psychiatrist who heads the University of Miami’s Center on Aging. Research into cognitive rehabilitation is just beginning, Eisdorfer adds.
“I think we’re at the point now where we have to be cautious about how we approach it and not oversell the idea,” he said.
Rozelle agrees that more research into mental fitness needs to be done, but says there’s enough evidence out there now to support what he’s doing with the Neurobics Club.
“It’s well accepted that to establish brain plasticity and brain fitness, it’s important to stimulate the brain in many and novel ways, because the brain gets lazy, but it responds to new stimulation.”
Loewenstein goes back to the gym analogy in assessing the benefit of a place like the Neurobics Club, saying: “Could it be helpful for some people? Absolutely, because some people could never exercise their brains,” just as others won’t do any activity unless they’re at a fitness club.
“But on the other hand, are you getting something here that you couldn’t get on your own and not pay money?”
___
On the Net:
Mind Spa, www.mind-spas.com
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Texas officials say layover mystery a homicide
Date: 11/18/2008
DALLAS (AP) _ A mysterious disappearance of an Alzheimer’s patient during a layover at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport seven years ago became a homicide case Monday after an examination of skeletal remains found miles from the airfield.
The Tarrant County medical examiner used DNA tests to identify the remains as 70-year-old Marjorie Dabney and ruled that her death was caused by a blow to the head, police said.
The remains were found last year near Lewisville Lake, about 15 miles north of the airport. Last month, Dabney’s clothing and business cards were found near the lake.
“I’m still shocked,” Dabney’s daughter, Candice Price, 38, of Indianapolis, told The Associated Press on Monday.
She said that in the years after her mother went missing, she convinced herself that someone had found her mother and was caring for her. Her mother was diabetic and an Alzheimer’s patient.
“To get this, that somebody hit her upside the head — you can’t prepare yourself for this,” Price said. “I’m furious because I’m hearing that someone has killed my mother. I want to know why. I want to know when.”
Authorities could not determine when Dabney died or if she was killed at the location where the remains were found, Linda Anderson, a spokeswoman for medical examiner, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Dabney disappeared Dec. 5, 2001, while traveling with her husband from Indianapolis to Bakersfield, Calif., where they were to move into a new home. During the layover, an airline escort accompanied Dabney’s wheelchair-bound husband to the restroom and asked Dabney to meet them at the gate. She never showed up and couldn’t be located.
Her mysterious disappearance drew national attention when trial lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. joined the family in the search. Cochran was one of the attorneys who represented O.J. Simpson during his 1995 murder trial in Los Angeles.
In 2003, Dabney’s husband, who had filed a $10 million lawsuit against American Airlines, agreed to an undisclosed settlement.
Price said that her father was in shock after learning of the developments in her mother’s death. “He’s in disbelief,” she said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
DALLAS (AP) _ A mysterious disappearance of an Alzheimer’s patient during a layover at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport seven years ago became a homicide case Monday after an examination of skeletal remains found miles from the airfield.
The Tarrant County medical examiner used DNA tests to identify the remains as 70-year-old Marjorie Dabney and ruled that her death was caused by a blow to the head, police said.
The remains were found last year near Lewisville Lake, about 15 miles north of the airport. Last month, Dabney’s clothing and business cards were found near the lake.
“I’m still shocked,” Dabney’s daughter, Candice Price, 38, of Indianapolis, told The Associated Press on Monday.
She said that in the years after her mother went missing, she convinced herself that someone had found her mother and was caring for her. Her mother was diabetic and an Alzheimer’s patient.
“To get this, that somebody hit her upside the head — you can’t prepare yourself for this,” Price said. “I’m furious because I’m hearing that someone has killed my mother. I want to know why. I want to know when.”
Authorities could not determine when Dabney died or if she was killed at the location where the remains were found, Linda Anderson, a spokeswoman for medical examiner, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Dabney disappeared Dec. 5, 2001, while traveling with her husband from Indianapolis to Bakersfield, Calif., where they were to move into a new home. During the layover, an airline escort accompanied Dabney’s wheelchair-bound husband to the restroom and asked Dabney to meet them at the gate. She never showed up and couldn’t be located.
Her mysterious disappearance drew national attention when trial lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. joined the family in the search. Cochran was one of the attorneys who represented O.J. Simpson during his 1995 murder trial in Los Angeles.
In 2003, Dabney’s husband, who had filed a $10 million lawsuit against American Airlines, agreed to an undisclosed settlement.
Price said that her father was in shock after learning of the developments in her mother’s death. “He’s in disbelief,” she said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
When Alzheimer’s hits at 40
Date: 11/14/2008
By SHIRLEY S. WANG
The Wall Street Journal
Brian Kammerer, the 45-year-old chief financial officer of a small hedge fund, called his wife one day from a cellphone in the men’s room of his Manhattan office building. A colleague had just asked him for something, he whispered, but he had no idea what it was.
“It clicks and it holds papers together,” he said.
“A stapler?” Kathy Kammerer asked.
“I think that’s what it’s called,” he replied.
Soon after that exchange in early 2003, the father of three was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, capping nearly five years of uncertainty and fear about his increasing forgetfulness and difficulty with language.
While most people who get Alzheimer’s are over 65, Mr. Kammerer is one of about 500,000 Americans living with Alzheimer’s or other dementias at an atypically young age. Alzheimer’s takes a long time to develop — usually, it isn’t diagnosed until 10 years after the first symptoms appear — but more Americans are identifying it early, thanks in part to aggressive screening programs pushed in recent years by groups including the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, a national alliance of caregivers.
The disease can be especially torturous when it creeps up on those in their 30s and 40s. As these patients move through Alzheimer’s early stages, they are forced to cope with the dread of not knowing what is happening to them, often in the years when they’re raising young children and building financial security. As the disease progresses, there are slip-ups to cover, appearances to keep up. When these “early onset” Alzheimer’s sufferers are finally diagnosed, they face hard questions — whom to tell and when, and what these divulgences mean for their jobs and health insurance.
Overall, an estimated 5.2 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, with as many as 10 percent diagnosed under the age of 65 — the definition of early onset, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, a national research organization. As the population ages, the number of individuals with Alzheimer’s is expected to hit 7.7 million in 2030.
There are no Alzheimer’s cures now on the market. Current medications mitigate some symptoms but don’t slow or halt the disease’s progression. Pharmaceutical companies are working on new therapies that reduce or remove amyloid, a sticky substance in the brain thought to play a role in the disease. There are more medicines in development for Alzheimer’s than any other neurologic disease except pain, according to Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group. It will likely be years before a new generation of drugs makes it to market.
Now 51 years old, Mr. Kammerer, like many Alzheimer’s patients, had no history of the disease in his family. He grew up on the north shore of Long Island, where he stood out at school for his talent with numbers. After attending college at the State University of New York-Albany, he got a job on Wall Street.
Mr. Kammerer met his future wife, Kathy, in 1983 at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, the investment bank where they both worked. Kathy, who had also grown up on Long Island, recalls not quite believing it when the handsome, fun-loving man with thick brown hair she was dating asked her to marry him.
They wed in 1991. Soon they had a son and two daughters, and Mrs. Kammerer stopped working to care for them at their home in Long Island’s Massapequa Park. Mr. Kammerer commuted into Manhattan.
Mr. Kammerer worked long hours in the office, his wife and former colleagues recall. But he also had a lively and self-deprecating sense of humor. Mrs. Kammerer said he was the life of the party. “He always had a cigar hanging out of his mouth,” she says.
He had “a blue-collar mentality in a white-collar job,” says Martin Jaffe, chief operating officer and co-founder of Silvercrest Asset Management Group LLC, who worked with Mr. Kammerer for 15 years.
Back home, Mr. Kammerer gave his children silly gifts like plastic glasses with fake moustaches and took his wife out dancing on date nights. He whisked the family away on surprise vacations to Florida. In the summers, he loved to barbecue and organized impromptu family slumber parties under the stars, his daughter Kate, now 13, recalls.
In 1998, Mr. Kammerer started complaining of ringing in his ear. He sometimes felt dizzy, Mrs. Kammerer recalls. Other times he gave his wife a look as though he didn’t understand what she had just said. The Kammerers sought out a neurologist, who suggested Mr. Kammerer get a magnetic resonance imaging scan of his brain.
When the MRI results came back, they didn’t look normal, the neurologist told the Kammerers. The doctor was unable to give them a diagnosis, however: He couldn’t say whether there was something wrong, Mrs. Kammerer recalls, or whether Mr. Kammerer’s brain had always looked that way.
Had they even suspected Alzheimer’s, it would have been difficult to diagnose. Doctors look for patients or their families to report a collection of symptoms — such as forgetfulness, social withdrawal and difficulty planning or finishing complex tasks — that worsen over years. (The dizziness and ringing ears Mr. Kammerer experienced aren’t generally considered symptoms.) Currently, Alzheimer’s can be diagnosed conclusively only by autopsy.
Mrs. Kammerer recalls staring at the picture of her husband’s brain. “This is our future,” she thought. She wondered whether she would need to get a job again should her husband be unable to work. The idea of going back to Wall Street terrified her, she says.
The Kammerers agreed that until they knew what was happening, life should go on as usual. They said nothing to the children. Around friends and colleagues, they kept quiet about their concerns, fearing Mr. Kammerer would lose his job if word of his symptoms leaked out. “I lost a lot of sleep,” Mrs. Kammerer says.
One day in 1999, Mrs. Kammerer grew more alarmed: Her husband couldn’t remember the word “sneaker.” Soon after that, he started saying things like “my brain is just not functioning right here,” Mrs. Kammerer recalls.
That year, at age 40, Mr. Kammerer was named a Chief Operating Officer of DLJ Mutual Funds, a Donaldson Lufkin division. His new responsibilities included presentations to the board of a Wall Street firm of 11,300 employees.
Within a year, Mr. Kammerer was struggling more often with words, a symptom of the disease called aphasia. But, always gifted at math, he showed no sign of having trouble with numbers, a key part of his job.
To compensate, he worked into the night, when colleagues weren’t around. He increasingly called his wife from work, reading her memos he had written to make sure they made sense.
Co-workers say they had no idea what he was going through. Debbi Avidon, who worked for Mr. Kammerer from 1993 to 2001 and is now at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., says she noticed Mr. Kammerer’s longer hours but attributed it to his workaholic tendencies. “He was always very diligent and thorough,” Ms. Avidon says.
Mr. Kammerer also withdrew socially. The cigar-smoking stopped. So did social drinking.
Mr. Jaffe, Mr. Kammerer’s former boss for much of his time at DLJ, says that had he known about Mr. Kammerer’s memory problems, he’s not sure what he’d have done. “I would hope we would take the high road,” he says. He would have been concerned about whether the condition hampered Mr. Kammerer’s command over important numbers, he says, which might have meant a change in job responsibilities. “There probably are many jobs you can do well with that malady,” he says.
In late 2000, Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse Group acquired DLJ. As is often the case in takeovers, Credit Suisse cut some of DLJ’s top executives. Mr. Kammerer lost his job in June 2001. His severance package included two years of salar y and a year of health insurance. He took the rest of the summer off and played a lot of golf.
By then, Mrs. Kammerer says, her husband didn’t recognize certain people and couldn’t name some objects. He became good at covering, smiling if he didn’t know what he was being asked or calling people whose names he’d forgotten “sweetie” or “buddy.”
Mr. Kammerer didn’t consider leaving the work force. His kids were all under the age of 12. There were many more years of private-school and college tuition to pay.
But he began to lower his sights. Returning home from a positive interview for a prestigious job — running a European company’s U.S. operations — he told his wife: “You know, Kathy, I don’t think I can do this.”
Instead, he sought out lower-level financial-industry jobs that wouldn’t require him to work closely with others. He wrote out cue cards to take with him on interviews and changed the topic when he didn’t understand what an interviewer had asked.
In 2002, he landed a position as chief financial officer at a small hedge fund, called Clipper Trading Associates, a position that involved managing the fund’s accounting and administration but not making trading decisions.
During this period, Mr. Kammerer visited specialist after specialist, his wife recalls. Suspecting stress was behind his symptoms, he sought out a psychotherapist and was prescribed antidepressants. He took antibiotics for six months to treat what doctors thought might be Lyme disease.
His eldest child, Patrick, noticed that his father seemed particularly absent-minded. One day, Patrick says, he prank-called Mr. Kammerer at his new job and told him he was calling from “Clipper Hedge and Grass Trimming.” Though father and son had often teased each other this way, Mr. Kammerer didn’t recognize his son’s voice or realize it was a joke, Patrick recalls.
One evening in 2003, after yet another test, a type of brain scan called a positron emission tomography, Mr. Kammerer’s physician called. Sitting in their bedroom, Mr. and Mrs. Kammerer got on separate phones to listen in.
“Mrs. Kammerer, I have some terrible news,” she remembers the doctor saying. “I believe your husband has Alzheimer’s.”
Mrs. Kammerer dropped to her knees. She recalls that her husband didn’t understand what was going on and told the doctor, “You have to hold on, something’s wrong with my wife.” They locked the bedroom door so the children couldn’t walk in. After Mrs. Kammerer explained to her husband that he had been diagnosed with a form of dementia, they sat quietly. “Your life kind of flashes before your eyes,” she says.
Mr. Kammerer had private disability insurance, but he relied on his job at Clipper for the family’s health insurance. Another significant concern was the cost of the children’s private school education. Mr. Kammerer decided to work as long as possible.
In 2004, Clipper announced it was shutting down.
The fund closed, it said at the time, because its potential risks in the market were outweighing the rewards it was offering its investors. Two of the fund’s partners, David Dahlberg and Scott Simon, say they were aware that Mr. Kammerer had been having health issues, specifically “inner ear” problems. “It wasn’t something that was affecting his job performance,” said Mr. Dahlberg. He added that had the partners known about Mr. Kammerer’s memory difficulties, he’s not sure how the professional relationship would have changed.
“That’s a difficult position for an employer to be in in any business, let alone our business, where short-term memory is important,” said Mr. Dahlberg.
By then, Mrs. Kammerer says, it was clear to her and her husband that he had deteriorated too much to try to find another job.
Mrs. Kammerer went back to work as an office assistant in the District Court in Hempstead, N.Y., providing the family with a small income and health insurance. His wife’s return to work distressed Mr. Kammerer, who saw it as his responsibility to support the family, she recalls.
The Kammerers also filed for Social Security disability benefits. The attorney they hired to help them with the massive paperwork told them the process could take up to 18 months, panicking Mrs. Kammerer. But they caught a break: Their application was approved in five weeks. Mr. Kammerer’s private disability insurance policy, which he took out in the ’90s, added several hundred dollars to their monthly Social Security payout and Mrs. Kammerer’s court salary.
The Kammerers organized one last family trip to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. They told Patrick about his father’s condition before leaving, but waited until later to tell the younger children, Colleen, now 14, and Kate.
At the end of 2006, the Kammerers transferred their assets to Mrs. Kammerer’s name to shield their estate from the treatment costs Mr. Kammerer is likely to face as the disease makes its slow progress. Mrs. Kammerer says her husband’s care costs $5,000 to $6,000 a year in co-payments on top of what their insurance covers. The costs are likely to escalate: Mr. Kammerer stays home while his wife is working and the kids are at school. In-home care, or a nursing home, would cost more. Mrs. Kammerer says she hopes that day is still years away.
Mrs. Kammerer wrestles with when to take responsibilities away from her husband. He still has his driver’s license, though he doesn’t drive anymore. The plan is to have him sit in the passenger seat and supervise Patrick, now 16, as he learns to drive this year.
Ten years after he first complained of a buzzing in his ears and five years after he was diagnosed, Mr. Kammerer spends most of his days sitting in a club chair in his bedroom and working intricate number puzzles. Two days a week, he attends a program for adults in their 30s through 50s who have dementia, where his favorite activity is dancing.
His math skills remain sharp, but he has trouble recognizing neighbors he has known for two decades. Rather than fiddle with objects he no longer understands, such as the stove, he ignores them. Sometimes, he takes a cab to a nearby golf course without telling anyone and hitches a ride back from a stranger, which unnerves Mrs. Kammerer.
Mrs. Kammerer says the most difficult aspect of her husband’s disease is that the couple used to be a team, but now she has to make the decisions on her own.
“We had a partnership and built a life together, and it was just taken away,” she says.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By SHIRLEY S. WANG
The Wall Street Journal
Brian Kammerer, the 45-year-old chief financial officer of a small hedge fund, called his wife one day from a cellphone in the men’s room of his Manhattan office building. A colleague had just asked him for something, he whispered, but he had no idea what it was.
“It clicks and it holds papers together,” he said.
“A stapler?” Kathy Kammerer asked.
“I think that’s what it’s called,” he replied.
Soon after that exchange in early 2003, the father of three was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, capping nearly five years of uncertainty and fear about his increasing forgetfulness and difficulty with language.
While most people who get Alzheimer’s are over 65, Mr. Kammerer is one of about 500,000 Americans living with Alzheimer’s or other dementias at an atypically young age. Alzheimer’s takes a long time to develop — usually, it isn’t diagnosed until 10 years after the first symptoms appear — but more Americans are identifying it early, thanks in part to aggressive screening programs pushed in recent years by groups including the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, a national alliance of caregivers.
The disease can be especially torturous when it creeps up on those in their 30s and 40s. As these patients move through Alzheimer’s early stages, they are forced to cope with the dread of not knowing what is happening to them, often in the years when they’re raising young children and building financial security. As the disease progresses, there are slip-ups to cover, appearances to keep up. When these “early onset” Alzheimer’s sufferers are finally diagnosed, they face hard questions — whom to tell and when, and what these divulgences mean for their jobs and health insurance.
Overall, an estimated 5.2 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, with as many as 10 percent diagnosed under the age of 65 — the definition of early onset, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, a national research organization. As the population ages, the number of individuals with Alzheimer’s is expected to hit 7.7 million in 2030.
There are no Alzheimer’s cures now on the market. Current medications mitigate some symptoms but don’t slow or halt the disease’s progression. Pharmaceutical companies are working on new therapies that reduce or remove amyloid, a sticky substance in the brain thought to play a role in the disease. There are more medicines in development for Alzheimer’s than any other neurologic disease except pain, according to Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group. It will likely be years before a new generation of drugs makes it to market.
Now 51 years old, Mr. Kammerer, like many Alzheimer’s patients, had no history of the disease in his family. He grew up on the north shore of Long Island, where he stood out at school for his talent with numbers. After attending college at the State University of New York-Albany, he got a job on Wall Street.
Mr. Kammerer met his future wife, Kathy, in 1983 at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, the investment bank where they both worked. Kathy, who had also grown up on Long Island, recalls not quite believing it when the handsome, fun-loving man with thick brown hair she was dating asked her to marry him.
They wed in 1991. Soon they had a son and two daughters, and Mrs. Kammerer stopped working to care for them at their home in Long Island’s Massapequa Park. Mr. Kammerer commuted into Manhattan.
Mr. Kammerer worked long hours in the office, his wife and former colleagues recall. But he also had a lively and self-deprecating sense of humor. Mrs. Kammerer said he was the life of the party. “He always had a cigar hanging out of his mouth,” she says.
He had “a blue-collar mentality in a white-collar job,” says Martin Jaffe, chief operating officer and co-founder of Silvercrest Asset Management Group LLC, who worked with Mr. Kammerer for 15 years.
Back home, Mr. Kammerer gave his children silly gifts like plastic glasses with fake moustaches and took his wife out dancing on date nights. He whisked the family away on surprise vacations to Florida. In the summers, he loved to barbecue and organized impromptu family slumber parties under the stars, his daughter Kate, now 13, recalls.
In 1998, Mr. Kammerer started complaining of ringing in his ear. He sometimes felt dizzy, Mrs. Kammerer recalls. Other times he gave his wife a look as though he didn’t understand what she had just said. The Kammerers sought out a neurologist, who suggested Mr. Kammerer get a magnetic resonance imaging scan of his brain.
When the MRI results came back, they didn’t look normal, the neurologist told the Kammerers. The doctor was unable to give them a diagnosis, however: He couldn’t say whether there was something wrong, Mrs. Kammerer recalls, or whether Mr. Kammerer’s brain had always looked that way.
Had they even suspected Alzheimer’s, it would have been difficult to diagnose. Doctors look for patients or their families to report a collection of symptoms — such as forgetfulness, social withdrawal and difficulty planning or finishing complex tasks — that worsen over years. (The dizziness and ringing ears Mr. Kammerer experienced aren’t generally considered symptoms.) Currently, Alzheimer’s can be diagnosed conclusively only by autopsy.
Mrs. Kammerer recalls staring at the picture of her husband’s brain. “This is our future,” she thought. She wondered whether she would need to get a job again should her husband be unable to work. The idea of going back to Wall Street terrified her, she says.
The Kammerers agreed that until they knew what was happening, life should go on as usual. They said nothing to the children. Around friends and colleagues, they kept quiet about their concerns, fearing Mr. Kammerer would lose his job if word of his symptoms leaked out. “I lost a lot of sleep,” Mrs. Kammerer says.
One day in 1999, Mrs. Kammerer grew more alarmed: Her husband couldn’t remember the word “sneaker.” Soon after that, he started saying things like “my brain is just not functioning right here,” Mrs. Kammerer recalls.
That year, at age 40, Mr. Kammerer was named a Chief Operating Officer of DLJ Mutual Funds, a Donaldson Lufkin division. His new responsibilities included presentations to the board of a Wall Street firm of 11,300 employees.
Within a year, Mr. Kammerer was struggling more often with words, a symptom of the disease called aphasia. But, always gifted at math, he showed no sign of having trouble with numbers, a key part of his job.
To compensate, he worked into the night, when colleagues weren’t around. He increasingly called his wife from work, reading her memos he had written to make sure they made sense.
Co-workers say they had no idea what he was going through. Debbi Avidon, who worked for Mr. Kammerer from 1993 to 2001 and is now at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., says she noticed Mr. Kammerer’s longer hours but attributed it to his workaholic tendencies. “He was always very diligent and thorough,” Ms. Avidon says.
Mr. Kammerer also withdrew socially. The cigar-smoking stopped. So did social drinking.
Mr. Jaffe, Mr. Kammerer’s former boss for much of his time at DLJ, says that had he known about Mr. Kammerer’s memory problems, he’s not sure what he’d have done. “I would hope we would take the high road,” he says. He would have been concerned about whether the condition hampered Mr. Kammerer’s command over important numbers, he says, which might have meant a change in job responsibilities. “There probably are many jobs you can do well with that malady,” he says.
In late 2000, Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse Group acquired DLJ. As is often the case in takeovers, Credit Suisse cut some of DLJ’s top executives. Mr. Kammerer lost his job in June 2001. His severance package included two years of salar y and a year of health insurance. He took the rest of the summer off and played a lot of golf.
By then, Mrs. Kammerer says, her husband didn’t recognize certain people and couldn’t name some objects. He became good at covering, smiling if he didn’t know what he was being asked or calling people whose names he’d forgotten “sweetie” or “buddy.”
Mr. Kammerer didn’t consider leaving the work force. His kids were all under the age of 12. There were many more years of private-school and college tuition to pay.
But he began to lower his sights. Returning home from a positive interview for a prestigious job — running a European company’s U.S. operations — he told his wife: “You know, Kathy, I don’t think I can do this.”
Instead, he sought out lower-level financial-industry jobs that wouldn’t require him to work closely with others. He wrote out cue cards to take with him on interviews and changed the topic when he didn’t understand what an interviewer had asked.
In 2002, he landed a position as chief financial officer at a small hedge fund, called Clipper Trading Associates, a position that involved managing the fund’s accounting and administration but not making trading decisions.
During this period, Mr. Kammerer visited specialist after specialist, his wife recalls. Suspecting stress was behind his symptoms, he sought out a psychotherapist and was prescribed antidepressants. He took antibiotics for six months to treat what doctors thought might be Lyme disease.
His eldest child, Patrick, noticed that his father seemed particularly absent-minded. One day, Patrick says, he prank-called Mr. Kammerer at his new job and told him he was calling from “Clipper Hedge and Grass Trimming.” Though father and son had often teased each other this way, Mr. Kammerer didn’t recognize his son’s voice or realize it was a joke, Patrick recalls.
One evening in 2003, after yet another test, a type of brain scan called a positron emission tomography, Mr. Kammerer’s physician called. Sitting in their bedroom, Mr. and Mrs. Kammerer got on separate phones to listen in.
“Mrs. Kammerer, I have some terrible news,” she remembers the doctor saying. “I believe your husband has Alzheimer’s.”
Mrs. Kammerer dropped to her knees. She recalls that her husband didn’t understand what was going on and told the doctor, “You have to hold on, something’s wrong with my wife.” They locked the bedroom door so the children couldn’t walk in. After Mrs. Kammerer explained to her husband that he had been diagnosed with a form of dementia, they sat quietly. “Your life kind of flashes before your eyes,” she says.
Mr. Kammerer had private disability insurance, but he relied on his job at Clipper for the family’s health insurance. Another significant concern was the cost of the children’s private school education. Mr. Kammerer decided to work as long as possible.
In 2004, Clipper announced it was shutting down.
The fund closed, it said at the time, because its potential risks in the market were outweighing the rewards it was offering its investors. Two of the fund’s partners, David Dahlberg and Scott Simon, say they were aware that Mr. Kammerer had been having health issues, specifically “inner ear” problems. “It wasn’t something that was affecting his job performance,” said Mr. Dahlberg. He added that had the partners known about Mr. Kammerer’s memory difficulties, he’s not sure how the professional relationship would have changed.
“That’s a difficult position for an employer to be in in any business, let alone our business, where short-term memory is important,” said Mr. Dahlberg.
By then, Mrs. Kammerer says, it was clear to her and her husband that he had deteriorated too much to try to find another job.
Mrs. Kammerer went back to work as an office assistant in the District Court in Hempstead, N.Y., providing the family with a small income and health insurance. His wife’s return to work distressed Mr. Kammerer, who saw it as his responsibility to support the family, she recalls.
The Kammerers also filed for Social Security disability benefits. The attorney they hired to help them with the massive paperwork told them the process could take up to 18 months, panicking Mrs. Kammerer. But they caught a break: Their application was approved in five weeks. Mr. Kammerer’s private disability insurance policy, which he took out in the ’90s, added several hundred dollars to their monthly Social Security payout and Mrs. Kammerer’s court salary.
The Kammerers organized one last family trip to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. They told Patrick about his father’s condition before leaving, but waited until later to tell the younger children, Colleen, now 14, and Kate.
At the end of 2006, the Kammerers transferred their assets to Mrs. Kammerer’s name to shield their estate from the treatment costs Mr. Kammerer is likely to face as the disease makes its slow progress. Mrs. Kammerer says her husband’s care costs $5,000 to $6,000 a year in co-payments on top of what their insurance covers. The costs are likely to escalate: Mr. Kammerer stays home while his wife is working and the kids are at school. In-home care, or a nursing home, would cost more. Mrs. Kammerer says she hopes that day is still years away.
Mrs. Kammerer wrestles with when to take responsibilities away from her husband. He still has his driver’s license, though he doesn’t drive anymore. The plan is to have him sit in the passenger seat and supervise Patrick, now 16, as he learns to drive this year.
Ten years after he first complained of a buzzing in his ears and five years after he was diagnosed, Mr. Kammerer spends most of his days sitting in a club chair in his bedroom and working intricate number puzzles. Two days a week, he attends a program for adults in their 30s through 50s who have dementia, where his favorite activity is dancing.
His math skills remain sharp, but he has trouble recognizing neighbors he has known for two decades. Rather than fiddle with objects he no longer understands, such as the stove, he ignores them. Sometimes, he takes a cab to a nearby golf course without telling anyone and hitches a ride back from a stranger, which unnerves Mrs. Kammerer.
Mrs. Kammerer says the most difficult aspect of her husband’s disease is that the couple used to be a team, but now she has to make the decisions on her own.
“We had a partnership and built a life together, and it was just taken away,” she says.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Italy: Father can end daughter’s life support
Date: 11/13/2008
By ARIEL DAVID
Associated Press Writer
ROME (AP) _ Italy’s highest court ruled Thursday in favor of a man’s request to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube and allow her to die after 16 years in a vegetative state.
Courts, politicians and the Vatican have weighed in on the fate of Eluana Englaro, who fell into a vegetative state following a car accident in 1992, when she was 20.
The Court of Cassation said it had rejected an appeal by prosecutors against a lower court ruling in July in favor of Beppino Englaro. The father had said his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.
Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious.
Beppino Englaro had fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube.
The decision “confirms that we live under the rule of law,” he was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.
Catholic and anti-euthanasia groups had protested the ruling by the lower court in Milan in front of the city’s Duomo.
Conservative politicians reacted angrily to Thursday’s ruling, saying that the courts had overstepped their bounds. Enrico La Loggia, a lawmaker in Permier Silvio Berlusconi’s party, likened the decision to a “death sentence.”
The Vatican’s top health official, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, was quoted by the Apcom agency as saying that disconnecting a feeding tube amounts to “killing a person.”
Eluana Englaro has been kept in a hospital and fed artificially in the northern city of Lecco. Doctors have called her condition irreversible.
Her case has evoked comparisons to that of Terry Schiavo, the American woman at the center of a right-to-die debate until her death in 2005. Schiavo was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after her heart stopped in 1990.
Schiavo’s husband, who wanted her feeding tube removed against her parents’ wishes, prevailed in a polarizing battle in the United States that reached Congress, President Bush and the Supreme Court.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By ARIEL DAVID
Associated Press Writer
ROME (AP) _ Italy’s highest court ruled Thursday in favor of a man’s request to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube and allow her to die after 16 years in a vegetative state.
Courts, politicians and the Vatican have weighed in on the fate of Eluana Englaro, who fell into a vegetative state following a car accident in 1992, when she was 20.
The Court of Cassation said it had rejected an appeal by prosecutors against a lower court ruling in July in favor of Beppino Englaro. The father had said his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.
Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious.
Beppino Englaro had fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube.
The decision “confirms that we live under the rule of law,” he was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.
Catholic and anti-euthanasia groups had protested the ruling by the lower court in Milan in front of the city’s Duomo.
Conservative politicians reacted angrily to Thursday’s ruling, saying that the courts had overstepped their bounds. Enrico La Loggia, a lawmaker in Permier Silvio Berlusconi’s party, likened the decision to a “death sentence.”
The Vatican’s top health official, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, was quoted by the Apcom agency as saying that disconnecting a feeding tube amounts to “killing a person.”
Eluana Englaro has been kept in a hospital and fed artificially in the northern city of Lecco. Doctors have called her condition irreversible.
Her case has evoked comparisons to that of Terry Schiavo, the American woman at the center of a right-to-die debate until her death in 2005. Schiavo was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after her heart stopped in 1990.
Schiavo’s husband, who wanted her feeding tube removed against her parents’ wishes, prevailed in a polarizing battle in the United States that reached Congress, President Bush and the Supreme Court.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Baucus wants to overhaul health care in ’09
Legal Comment: The below story about progress already being made in healthcare reform, in conjunction with the overwhelming consensus of the just completed campaign that some type of meaningful reform is coming, is the best of news for the disability community. Particularly important highlights are the proposal to eliminate the waiting period for Medicare, the elimination of exclusions for preexisting conditions and the availability of coverage for low income individuals.
All those who are permanently disabled by brain are affected by some combination of these three problems. That some type of program addressing these issues is likely to be in place in the next six months is the type of “Change we Can Believe In.” The one point not clarified below that does need to be addressed is a more comprehensive prescription drug program.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com
http://thelegaltimes.net
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
Date: 11/12/2008
By KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) _ The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee intends to push Congress to overhaul the nation’s health care system during the first six months of next year.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said “now is the time” for Congress to move on health care. On Wednesday, he made public his own plan for addressing what ails the health care system. It includes several features of President-elect Obama’s plan, such as guaranteed insurance coverage regardless of pre-existing illness. He also would set up an insurance exchange, a sort of government-administered shopping center where people could go to buy coverage.
Baucus goes beyond Obama’s plan by requiring everybody to purchase health insurance once affordable options are available. He predicted that such a major difference would get worked out.
The mandate to have health insurance will stop the shifting of costs for care of the uninsured onto those who have health coverage, Baucus said.
“Coverage of all Americans will also make reforms work better, from insurance market reforms to a cost-saving focus on preventive care,” he said. “Those who cannot afford coverage will not be required to purchase it — there will be other options for them.”
Baucus’s 89-page report said the mandate to obtain health coverage would also prevent people from waiting until they get sick to buy insurance.
Baucus’ committee has jurisdiction over health programs financed by a specific tax or trust fund, such as Medicare and Medicaid. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, will also play a role in any major overhaul of the system. He, too, has said health care changes can’t wait.
But paying for expanding health coverage will be expensive, and many independent analysts question whether Congress can make it happen under current economic conditions. Baucus did not offer a way to pay for his proposal, which included such costly provisions as allowing people ages 55-64 to participate in Medicare and eliminating the requirement that disabled people wait two years from when they become disabled to enroll in Medicare.
“We all must realize that the costs of inaction, both in human and financial terms, will eventually be far greater than any initial outlays,” the report said.
Baucus would also increase the number of people eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state partnership that provides health care to the poor. States would be required to cover all adults whose income is at or below the federal poverty level, now $17,600 for a family of three. He also would require that states cover uninsured children at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, $44,000 for a family of three. In each instance, about two dozen states would have to increase current eligibility levels.
Baucus said states would be given additional financial help to cover the higher caseloads, but he didn’t provide specifics. Many states are struggling to pay for those they already cover under Medicaid and the children’s health insurance program, much less adding millions to the rolls.
The question before Obama will be whether to pursue health reform incrementally or to try for comprehensive change in one massive bill next year. It’s unclear which approach will be pursued, but Obama has listed the issue as one of his top domestic priorities.
“President-elect Obama applauds Chairman Baucus’s work to draw attention to the challenges of the health system and looks forward to working closely with the chairman and other congressional leaders, as well as the American public, to make quality, affordable health care a reality for all Americans.” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama’s transition team.
Baucus also embraces the idea that the current tax treatment of health insurance produces inflationary pressures contributing to the high cost of insurance. He said one way to reduce those pressures would be to limit the amount of money that can be directed toward health insurance on a tax-free basis. Once people reached the limit, the money employers spend for health insurance would be treated as taxable income.
Several interest groups applauded Baucus’s efforts, but one conservative think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, deemed his plan unrealistic.
“The bottom line is that the Baucus plan will exacerbate current problems of skyrocketing costs and limited access while creating a huge burden for individual taxpayers and businesses,” said Devon Herrick, an economist at the center. “There is no such thing as free health care.”
___
On the Net:
Senate Finance Committee: http://finance.senate.gov
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
All those who are permanently disabled by brain are affected by some combination of these three problems. That some type of program addressing these issues is likely to be in place in the next six months is the type of “Change we Can Believe In.” The one point not clarified below that does need to be addressed is a more comprehensive prescription drug program.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com
http://thelegaltimes.net
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
Date: 11/12/2008
By KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) _ The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee intends to push Congress to overhaul the nation’s health care system during the first six months of next year.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said “now is the time” for Congress to move on health care. On Wednesday, he made public his own plan for addressing what ails the health care system. It includes several features of President-elect Obama’s plan, such as guaranteed insurance coverage regardless of pre-existing illness. He also would set up an insurance exchange, a sort of government-administered shopping center where people could go to buy coverage.
Baucus goes beyond Obama’s plan by requiring everybody to purchase health insurance once affordable options are available. He predicted that such a major difference would get worked out.
The mandate to have health insurance will stop the shifting of costs for care of the uninsured onto those who have health coverage, Baucus said.
“Coverage of all Americans will also make reforms work better, from insurance market reforms to a cost-saving focus on preventive care,” he said. “Those who cannot afford coverage will not be required to purchase it — there will be other options for them.”
Baucus’s 89-page report said the mandate to obtain health coverage would also prevent people from waiting until they get sick to buy insurance.
Baucus’ committee has jurisdiction over health programs financed by a specific tax or trust fund, such as Medicare and Medicaid. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, will also play a role in any major overhaul of the system. He, too, has said health care changes can’t wait.
But paying for expanding health coverage will be expensive, and many independent analysts question whether Congress can make it happen under current economic conditions. Baucus did not offer a way to pay for his proposal, which included such costly provisions as allowing people ages 55-64 to participate in Medicare and eliminating the requirement that disabled people wait two years from when they become disabled to enroll in Medicare.
“We all must realize that the costs of inaction, both in human and financial terms, will eventually be far greater than any initial outlays,” the report said.
Baucus would also increase the number of people eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state partnership that provides health care to the poor. States would be required to cover all adults whose income is at or below the federal poverty level, now $17,600 for a family of three. He also would require that states cover uninsured children at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, $44,000 for a family of three. In each instance, about two dozen states would have to increase current eligibility levels.
Baucus said states would be given additional financial help to cover the higher caseloads, but he didn’t provide specifics. Many states are struggling to pay for those they already cover under Medicaid and the children’s health insurance program, much less adding millions to the rolls.
The question before Obama will be whether to pursue health reform incrementally or to try for comprehensive change in one massive bill next year. It’s unclear which approach will be pursued, but Obama has listed the issue as one of his top domestic priorities.
“President-elect Obama applauds Chairman Baucus’s work to draw attention to the challenges of the health system and looks forward to working closely with the chairman and other congressional leaders, as well as the American public, to make quality, affordable health care a reality for all Americans.” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama’s transition team.
Baucus also embraces the idea that the current tax treatment of health insurance produces inflationary pressures contributing to the high cost of insurance. He said one way to reduce those pressures would be to limit the amount of money that can be directed toward health insurance on a tax-free basis. Once people reached the limit, the money employers spend for health insurance would be treated as taxable income.
Several interest groups applauded Baucus’s efforts, but one conservative think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, deemed his plan unrealistic.
“The bottom line is that the Baucus plan will exacerbate current problems of skyrocketing costs and limited access while creating a huge burden for individual taxpayers and businesses,” said Devon Herrick, an economist at the center. “There is no such thing as free health care.”
___
On the Net:
Senate Finance Committee: http://finance.senate.gov
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Massive malaria vaccine trial to begin in Africa
Date: 11/10/2008
By DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) _ Researchers trying to create the world’s first malaria vaccine are launching a large medical trial as early as next month involving 16,000 children that could be the largest such trial ever conducted on children in Africa.
British-drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC is teaming with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is an anti-malaria charity funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and clinics and research centers in Africa to develop a malaria vaccine.
“This is probably going to be one of the largest studies in infants and in children in Africa,” said Joe Cohen, a top vaccine researcher for GlaxoSmithKline.
Malaria, caused by parasites and spread by mosquitoes, kills nearly 1 million people every year, most of them children in Africa. The trial may start as early as next month, and should be well under way by January, said Cohen.
The massive vaccine trials will be conducted in Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Dr. Christian Loucq, director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, said the project has been working over the past year to upgrade laboratory, computer and other equipment in those countries, train technicians, and even help develop local equivalents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure the trials are properly monitored.
The Malaria Vaccine Initiative has so far spent $107 million on the project and has not yet calculated how much more is coming. GlaxoSmithKline has spent $300 million so far, and estimates there will be $100 million more.
Researchers working on the trial said in an interview in Johannesburg that much of the groundwork already has been laid in preliminary trials involving 4,000 children conducted since 2003.
They said that even if their vaccine does not succeed, the widespread investment needed to conduct the trials means that Africa will be left with better communications, research and other infrastructure that could be used in the search for vaccines against other diseases such as AIDS.
While the researchers were optimistic, it will be several years before they know whether their vaccine candidate is safe and effective enough for wide use.
The preliminary trials showed the vaccine was likely to be at least 30 percent effective against mild malaria cases and about 50 percent effective against severe malaria. That may sound low compared to, for example, the injectable polio vaccine that is at least 90 percent effective. But researchers have found it difficult to pin down a vaccine for parasites, and further tests may show the GlaxoSmithKline candidate is more effective, Cohen said.
Dr. Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist with the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, said a vaccine might have to be more effective than the GlaxoSmithKline candidate has been shown to be so far to be worth the effort of putting it in use. But he acknowledged that matching the effectiveness of the polio vaccine has proven difficult, and said a partially effective vaccine “at least will reduce the workload on the health sector.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, is not involved in vaccine research, but is at the forefront of treating malaria among the poor in Africa and elsewhere.
The vaccine would have to be used along with preventive measures like mosquito nets and insecticides to save lives.
Dr. Eusebio Macete, who is director of the Manhica Research Centre in Mozambique and was involved in some of the early field trials, said stopping any percentage of the disease would be welcomed in areas “where people are dying every day of malaria.”
“It’s a huge, huge burden, this disease,” Macete said. “Whatever percentage we can get will be useful in reducing the impact of the disease.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) _ Researchers trying to create the world’s first malaria vaccine are launching a large medical trial as early as next month involving 16,000 children that could be the largest such trial ever conducted on children in Africa.
British-drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC is teaming with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is an anti-malaria charity funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and clinics and research centers in Africa to develop a malaria vaccine.
“This is probably going to be one of the largest studies in infants and in children in Africa,” said Joe Cohen, a top vaccine researcher for GlaxoSmithKline.
Malaria, caused by parasites and spread by mosquitoes, kills nearly 1 million people every year, most of them children in Africa. The trial may start as early as next month, and should be well under way by January, said Cohen.
The massive vaccine trials will be conducted in Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Dr. Christian Loucq, director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, said the project has been working over the past year to upgrade laboratory, computer and other equipment in those countries, train technicians, and even help develop local equivalents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure the trials are properly monitored.
The Malaria Vaccine Initiative has so far spent $107 million on the project and has not yet calculated how much more is coming. GlaxoSmithKline has spent $300 million so far, and estimates there will be $100 million more.
Researchers working on the trial said in an interview in Johannesburg that much of the groundwork already has been laid in preliminary trials involving 4,000 children conducted since 2003.
They said that even if their vaccine does not succeed, the widespread investment needed to conduct the trials means that Africa will be left with better communications, research and other infrastructure that could be used in the search for vaccines against other diseases such as AIDS.
While the researchers were optimistic, it will be several years before they know whether their vaccine candidate is safe and effective enough for wide use.
The preliminary trials showed the vaccine was likely to be at least 30 percent effective against mild malaria cases and about 50 percent effective against severe malaria. That may sound low compared to, for example, the injectable polio vaccine that is at least 90 percent effective. But researchers have found it difficult to pin down a vaccine for parasites, and further tests may show the GlaxoSmithKline candidate is more effective, Cohen said.
Dr. Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist with the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, said a vaccine might have to be more effective than the GlaxoSmithKline candidate has been shown to be so far to be worth the effort of putting it in use. But he acknowledged that matching the effectiveness of the polio vaccine has proven difficult, and said a partially effective vaccine “at least will reduce the workload on the health sector.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, is not involved in vaccine research, but is at the forefront of treating malaria among the poor in Africa and elsewhere.
The vaccine would have to be used along with preventive measures like mosquito nets and insecticides to save lives.
Dr. Eusebio Macete, who is director of the Manhica Research Centre in Mozambique and was involved in some of the early field trials, said stopping any percentage of the disease would be welcomed in areas “where people are dying every day of malaria.”
“It’s a huge, huge burden, this disease,” Macete said. “Whatever percentage we can get will be useful in reducing the impact of the disease.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.