Air Pollution & Dementia - AI Therapy - Walking & Alzheimer's - Gautier Obit

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Breedlove, S

unread,

Nov 5, 2025, 6:37:38 AMNov 5

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/health/alzheimers-dementia-air-pollution.html

What the Air You Breathe May Be Doing to Your Brain

By Paula Span

For years, the two patients had come to the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where doctors and researchers follow people with cognitive impairment as they age, as well as a group with normal cognition.

Both patients, a man and a woman, had agreed to donate their brains after they died for further research. “An amazing gift,” said Dr. Edward Lee, the neuropathologist who directs the brain bank at the university’s Perelman School of Medicine. “They were both very dedicated to helping us understand Alzheimer’s disease.”

The man, who died at 83 with dementia, had lived in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia with hired caregivers. The autopsy showed large amounts of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease, spreading through his brain.

Researchers also found infarcts, small spots of damaged tissue, indicating that he had suffered several strokes.

By contrast, the woman, who was 84 when she died of brain cancer, “had barely any Alzheimer’s pathology,” Dr. Lee said. “We had tested her year after year, and she had no cognitive issues at all.”

The man had lived a few blocks from Interstate 676, which slices through downtown Philadelphia. The woman had lived a few miles away in the suburb of Gladwyne, Pa., surrounded by woods and a country club.

The amount of air pollution she was exposed to — specifically, the level of fine particulate matter called PM2.5 — was less than half that of his exposure. Was it a coincidence that he had developed severe Alzheimer’s while she had remained cognitively normal?

With increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5, a neurotoxin, not only damages lungs and hearts but is also associated with dementia, probably not.

--------------------

https://undark.org/2025/11/04/chatbot-mental-health/

Researchers Weigh the Use of AI for Mental Health

By Ramin Skibba

In August, two parents in California filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company was responsible for their teenage son’s suicide. The previous fall, according to Maria and Matthew Raine, their 16-year-old, Adam, had started using the company’s popular AI chatbot ChatGPT as a homework helper. Over the course of several months, the Raines alleged, it shifted to a digital companion and then to a “suicide coach,” advising the teen how to quietly steal vodka from his parent’s liquor cabinet, urging him to keep his suicidal ideations a secret, and then guiding him about the feasibility and load-bearing capacity of a noose. By the time of Adam’s death in April, according to the Raines’ complaint, the chatbot had used the word “suicide” 1,275 times, six times more often than Adam himself.

The case of Adam Raines was not an isolated incident, though publicly available data remains limited. And experts worry that more mental health crises, including suicides — the second leading cause of death among people between ages 10 and 24 years — could arise as users increasingly turn to generative AI chatbots for emotional support. Although it is difficult to pinpoint just how many people are relying on chatbots in this way, according to a recent Harvard Business Review survey based primarily on data collected from Reddit forum posts, the practice is common for therapy, companionship, and finding purpose.

Researchers have scrambled to understand the trend, including both the potential risks and benefits of the chatbots, most of which were not designed to be used for mental health support. Some users claim that the bots help them, citing their perception that the tools won’t judge or stigmatize them, while others are seeking a substitute for therapy when they can’t access or afford it, experts say. Some users also don’t think of the chatbots as a form of therapy, but rather a kind of mindful journaling as they work through their emotions and problems. According to one example in the Harvard Business Review report, a Reddit user said, “I found a thread where people talked about using AI to analyze their moods, essentially having low-barrier ‘therapy’ sessions.
--------------------

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/03/walking-3000-steps-day-may-slow-progression-alzheimers

Walking 3,000 or more steps a day may slow progression of Alzheimer’s

Ian Sample Science editor

Even modest amounts of daily exercise may slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in older people who are at risk of developing the condition, researchers have said.

People are often encouraged to clock up 10,000 steps a day as part of a healthy routine, but scientists found 3,000 steps or more appeared to delay the brain changes and cognitive decline that Alzheimer’s patients experience.

Results from the 14-year-long study showed cognitive decline was delayed by an average of three years in people who walked 3,000 to 5,000 steps a day, and by seven years in those who managed 5,000 to 7,000 steps daily.

“We’re encouraging older people who are at risk of Alzheimer’s to consider making small changes to their activity levels, to build sustained habits that protect or benefit their brain and cognitive health,” said Dr Wai-Ying Yau, the first author on the study at Mass General Brigham hospital in Boston.

Dementia affects an estimated 50 million people worldwide, with Alzheimer’s disease the most common cause. In the UK, more than 500,000 people have Alzheimer’s. The condition is linked to the buildup of two toxic forms of proteins in the brain, namely amyloid-beta plaques and tau tangles.

Yau and her colleagues analysed data from 296 people aged 50 to 90 who were cognitively unimpaired at the beginning of the study. The data included annual cognitive assessments, step counts measured by pedometers, and PET imaging to detect levels of amyloid and tau in the volunteers’ brains.

People with little brain amyloid at the start showed very little cognitive decline or buildup of tau protein over the course of the study. The risk of Alzheimer’s was greater for those with elevated amyloid at baseline, and among them, higher step counts were linked to slower rates of cognitive decline and a delayed buildup of tau proteins. In sedentary individuals, the buildup of tau and cognitive decline was substantially faster, the researchers report in the journal Nature Medicine.
© 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited
--------------------

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/health/marthe-gautier-dead.html

Marthe Gautier, 96, Dies; Had Key Role in Down Syndrome Breakthrough

By Denise Grady

Dr. Marthe Gautier, a physician and researcher who had a major role in identifying the cause of Down syndrome but whose achievement was undermined when a male colleague took credit for her work, died on April 30, 2022. She was 96.

Her death, in a retirement home in Meaux, France, though not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by her great-niece Tatiana Giraud. The New York Times, which had prepared an obituary about Dr. Gautier in advance, in 2018, learned of her death only recently.

The disputed research in which Dr. Gautier was involved produced a historic breakthrough: It revealed that people with Down syndrome have an extra chromosome, one of the microscopic strands of DNA and protein that carry a person’s genetic blueprint.

Most humans have 46 chromosomes. Down syndrome is also called trisomy 21, meaning that three copies of the 21st chromosome are present instead of two, for a total of 47 chromosomes.

The discovery, at the Armand-Trousseau Hospital in Paris in 1958, was the first to link an abnormal number of chromosomes to a disorder that causes intellectual disability. More connections between such conditions and aberrant chromosomes were soon found.

Those advances led to the development of tests to diagnose the disorders before birth, making it possible to terminate affected pregnancies in many cases.

Dr. Gautier’s story “starts like a fairy tale and ends like villainy,” said Dr. Jean Kachaner, a former student of hers who is a pediatric cardiologist at the Necker Hospital for children in Paris.