Carter’s blog: Svenska dagen 2011-01-22

Blog 12

Well first and foremost I'd like to say Happy New Year dear reader, although I am aware it is now closer to the Chinese New Year than the Gregorian one. It has been a while since I last blogged and I'm failing miserably to keep to a two blogs per month delivery so I thought I'd give a quick update. I'm back in Sweden, after the Christmas holidays and a short trip to Miami for a conference, and I've been enjoying a mini-heatwave in Stockholm having experienced +^oC temperatures for a few days recently.

A lot has happened since Blog 11, much of which I won't bore you with here. One piece of good news was that Liverpool FC parted company with Roy Hodgson. I predicted back in Blog 5 that he'd be a disaster at Liverpool and that turned out to be the case. Hopefully with King Kenny in charge (temporarily) the players will now start to play better and steer the club to at least top-eight safety. I'm not sure if Kenny is the right man long-term, my heart says yes, my head can't decide. He's got 15 more league games and at least 2 Europa League matches to help make my mind up. Good Luck to him!

In other news the Food and Drug Administration in the USA have been given the green light by an expert panel for the use of a brain imaging marker (¹⁸F Florbetapir - AV45) to help diagnose Alzheimer's disease. The approval came with the caveat that doctors will need to be trained in how to reliably interpret the brain scans. Why am I telling you this? Well this kind of brain imaging (Positron Emission Tomography; PET) is what I do for a living. It means that in the not too distant future if you are experiencing memory problems in your elderly years a PET scan using Florbetapir could be requested by your doctor to help determine if you have Alzheimer's disease or not. This is good news as being able to diagnose Alzheimer's as early and as accurately as possible is thought to be important for the best treatment outcome. The major problem that still remains is that there are no effective medications yet that can stop the disease in it's tracks and it seems that effective treatments are still some way off; but there is hope. (Disclaimer: the image to the right isn't of Florbetapir but of ¹¹C-PIB which was the first amyloid PET marker used in-vivo for Alzheimer's patients here in Sweden back in 2002; Kulnk et al 2004 Annals of Neurology)

Well I think that wraps up the first entry to The Stockholm Project 2011. I discovered before Christmas that I will be in Stockholm for another year, until 2012, so I think it's time that I really started making an effort to learn to speak Swedish. Also I'm aware I promised at the end of the last Blog that I'd try to explain why I became a cognitive neuroscientist, I haven't forgotten, it will just require a bit of effort to write so I will try to deliver it in Blog 13. Until then dear reader.