tau

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease thought to play a role in the deaths (which are sometimes suicides) of athletes, soldiers, and others who have suffered concussions and repeated hits to the head, is currently only able to be diagnosed postmortem.

"After a while it gets old and not so fulfilling to take the brain out when [an athlete] is dead," Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and director of the Brain Injury Research Institute, told CNN. "At that point there is no solution, no answer."

So a study co-authored by Bailes suggesting that PET scans … Read more

There's a celebration for everything these days--National Yo-Yo Day, Ice Cream Day, even Corduroy Day. March 14 was Pi Day--3.14... get it? On Pi Day, which celebrates the number that represents the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, enthusiasts had pie-eating contests and played educational games.

Guess what today is! It's Tau Day. Tau represents the circumference of a circle divided by the radius, which is approximately 6.28. Today is June 28... get it?

Apparently, people have been celebrating this day for 10 years. On Tau Day last year, theoretical physicist Michael Hartl launched the Tau Manifesto, which explained why pi is confusing and instead should be replaced with tau.

One of his reasons: Since tau is the ratio of circumference to radius of a circle, circles are more naturally defined by their radius than diameter. (Are you still following this?)… Read more

This week, at Cleveland Clinic's 2010 Medical Innovation Summit, the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2011 have been predicted, with the new brain imaging compound AV-45--which is poised to help early detection of Alzheimer's--taking the top spot.

Alzheimer's gets its name from German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer, who began lecturing in the early 1900s about the plaques and tangles he'd found in the post-mortem brain tissue of a 51-year-old patient.

To this day, diagnosing the disease while a patient is still alive is tricky, and there is still no cure. But there have been several breakthroughs … Read more

It appears that a single gene variation provides clues as to how rapidly Alzheimer's disease will progress, according to an international investigation of tau proteins in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which was led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings were reported online yesterday in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

It has recently been established in multiple studies that elevated levels of this protein in cerebrospinal fluid indicate Alzheimer's, and that because symptoms can reveal themselves slowly, testing levels of tau would offer a glimpse into the future--a red pill, if you … Read more