One for #dementia epidemiology geeks. I was bored so I played with AI to make DAGs for dementia risk. This is around version 15 or so. It's quite useful actually as you can infer the likely effects of specific risk modification on dementia pathology.

This is quite a graph, considering how much of the US economy now relies on AI companies remaining globally dominant. www.ft.com/content/9c8f...

Great that you’re making your LLM private but with the most basic of testing it provides incorrect information through lack of source verification. There’s lots to like but you need to take responsibility for your health information, especially if you disintermediate the original source.

Beware of convincing looking Disney+ phishing attempt. Always check email address.

Looks like sticking your head in a printer. 😆

OK, now we know who's using up all the compute power.

I'm honestly not too fussed about Andy Burnham. If he gets in then he's likely to bring a bit of populist charisma to fight fire with fire and hopefully keep us from being governed by morons for a few years more. But that does mean we're going to see an awful lot of this over the next few weeks.

Luxury private dementia assessment in London with all the biomarker trimmings costs £12k now. 😮 www.berkeleypsychiatrists.co.uk/dementia-mem...

Like a disney princess version of Aphex Twin Window locker (1999) album cover.

The contrast between the Everard case and this one, at least in terms of police response, could not be more stark. If you’re just sealioning then fine, you do you, but if you really think there is any equivalence between these cases I think you should acquaint yourself with the judge’s statement:

This kind of says it all. Don't expect to be thrilled by transfers over the summer.

*Huge* kudos to these researchers who managed to get longitudinal EEG data from older people with delirium and make it feel like a pampering rather than having your mind wiped by the CIA. 👏👏👏 Fascinating results too.

Hi Abi, this is my proposed draft opener for Dementia Action Week in the UK. Can I get your thoughts on how likely it is to raise BP of readers, given your experiences above? I've tried to achieve a balance between realistic expectations, avoiding moralistic undertones, and encouraging engagement!

This was interesting. I'd always attributed this 'disoriented in time and place' symptom more to episodic memory deficits than to those of attention. Any thoughts from neuro/psych types on what cognitive domains feed into this classic sign of #dementia, and how much and how they contribute?

I thought one of the most informative takeaways in the paper was this though. Dementia is indeed the "UK's biggest killer" (at least, according to ONS cause of death stats), but the impact is so much greater on life lost at younger ages.

Yes, very much. At 65 dementia tends to be a solo act, as it were, whereas at 85 it's often part of a band of cormorbid conditions, souped up by the accelerating effects of ageing. Hence this figure (bottom) on time to admission to nursing home. Even the difference between 75 and 85 is massive.

Well-presented bit of BMJ dataviz on this topic too. TLDR; we need to change the way we explain survival times in dementia. Saying "5-7 years on average" doesn't cut it anymore. Also really helpful to give people a better estimate on nursing home admission and likely time (and £££) spent there.

Can't find any of the authors on here, but if anyone knows them please pass on my thanks!

Here's a few others that I can compile automatically. Otherwise it would be a case of manually checking the register, which would be fine except of course most of these local projects survive on short-term grants, so the info goes out of date really quickly. :(

I found this. Not dementia specific but a starting point: a national register of social farm projects. www.farmgarden.org.uk/about-us/our... As always, the area where I live is a social desert, despite having many farms and lots people with dementia! (West/North Norfolk is so rubbish for anything 🙄)

Vitamin K injections at birth are one of the cheapest, safest and most effective health interventions ever devised. Such utterly pointless loss and suffering. MAGA has made people afraid of any substance delivered through a needle to a small child, regardless of evidence. The default is 'no'.

"Peter Thiel backs $1bn ocean data centre start-up powered by waves". I'm guessing it will look something like this?

A rarely measured, excellent piece on this sorry topic. Like many in the US, I grew up as a kid in the UK in the 80s and 90s believing Israel to be a beacon of democracy and hope for a persecuted people, not an ethno-fascist genocidal theocracy. This final paragraph sums up where we are right now.

My bee hotel had a relatively quiet first year last year but this year business is booming. Not entirely sure who my guests are though? Any bee people out there who might know? They’re very hive-like. Are they honey bees?

Kind of nice on a sunny Spring morning. But other than a few pests it has zero ecological value. Please fill it with cheap, renewable, politically autonomous energy producers that don’t cause wars and make our grandchildren’s world uninhabitable.

Managing to channel Henry VIII *and* Thomas Paine at the same time. Impressive.

Yikes. I would not use a law firm that paid bonuses to staff for using Copilot more. The story itself is interesting though. After all the hype about how AI will save time and make junior staff redundant, it turns out we need those staff to wade through reams of AI-generated client correspondence.

So you do your big study, publish your results and then you get to the boring bit where you have to communicate your work to patients (cos otherwise you won’t get funding). Completely expect patients at a local GP in Norfolk to know WTF a systematic review and meta-analysis is. They can look it up.

Righteous stuff. This war in no way qualifies as just according to Christian traditions. It’s the physical manifestation of a weak old man’s insecurity. The thousands of civilians killed so far are nothing compared to the millions who will starve next year as crop yields plummet and economies crash.

Huge if true. In other news, bears confirmed as shitting in woods.