Tom Harkin Quotes

There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected.

More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.

It may act as an ancillary factor, but by itself, the mutation in tau doesn't give you Alzheimer's disease. This is not to say the tau is not very important. It may be important in propagating the disorder from one cell to another. But as a causal mechanism, the evidence is strongest for beta amyloid abnormalities.

I think it's important that, as a matter of course, the brain and spinal column were removed from this cow, and that would be the material that would cause concern in terms of human health. And therefore we're confident in the safety of the food supply.

When you're indestructible, then nothing is a threat really. So nothing needs to be taken that seriously.

It's been studied to the point where we know that the impact on humans would be from consuming the most infected parts of the cow; that is, the brain and the spinal cord.

Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.

In a prime-time address, President Bush said he backed limited federal funding for stem cell research. That's right, the President said, this is a quote, the research could help cure brain diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and whatever it is I have.

Alzheimer's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami.

Even slight elevations in blood sugar have been shown to increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

With Alzheimer's, recent memory is affected first. At the start, you count the memory loss in days, then hours - then in minutes. But there's also an insidious backward creep of deterioration.

Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.

It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.

I don't know a great deal about Alzheimer's - just what it does.

We've now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker.

One thing that's important to understand is that it's believed that the pathology of CTE doesn't have to do with concussion so much as it has to do with the accumulation of sub-concussive hits. So every hit matters. If you're subject to 800 or 1,200 of these every year, it accumulates. It's like erosion.

The thought of having sclerosis of the synapses is alarming. I wonder if in later life I will pay the price for having overstimulated my mental apparatus in my twenties.

The overwhelming evidence is that trauma is a major factor in CTE.

All the NFL players I have examined pathologically, I have not seen one that did not have changes in their brain system with brain damage.

One definitely wants to have a functioning hippocampus. It's all about learning and memory, the part blown out of the water by Alzheimer's disease. It's also the part that is most vulnerable to the effects of stress.

The beginnings of CTE can start quite early.

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

I have a lot of college football players in my Brain Bank with CTE.

When I read Mike Webster's file before I began his autopsy, I knew he was more than a 50-year-old heart attack victim. His file and the television reports of the death of the former Pittsburgh Steelers center described a long, steep fall into bizarre behavior. I suspected he suffered from some sort of brain disorder.