Research is emerging that casts serious doubt on the major hypothesis as to the cause of Alzheimer's disease, raising questions as to whether scientists really understand the disease at all.

The most effective drug currently in use for the treatment of Alzheimer's is not any of the complex drugs developed or used in the United States or in Western Europe, which slow cognitive decline for only about six to nine months. That honor goes to a Russian antihistamine named dimebolin, which reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's for a full year. Although not currently approved for U.S. use by the FDA, dimebolin is shaking up the Alzheimer's research world.

In a study conducted by researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and presented at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Vienna, dimebolin was found to drastically improve symptoms at the same time that it led to a drastic increase in the levels of the beta amyloid protein in brain cells, both in cell-based experiments and in the brains of mice. Yet beta amyloids are the very molecules that most Western researchers have, until recently, believed to be the cause of the disease, by forming sticky plaques in the brain that interfere with neural functioning.

All of a sudden, H1N1 vaccines are available all across America. Walgreens and other pharmacies are pushing the vaccines as if there were an "everything must go" liquidation sale under way. Hurry, get your swine flu vaccine today before everybody figures out they're useless!

The marketability of vaccines has a strict time limit. They're only in demand during the fear phase of a pandemic, and that fear phase has long since faded for H1N1. Virtually everyone who wants an H1N1 vaccine has already received one, and the rest of the population is beginning to notice something quite curious: People who got the vaccine are no better off than those who skipped it. In fact, there's no difference in mortality between those who were vaccinated and those who weren't, indicating yet again that the swine flu vaccine was a medical hoax to begin with.

If you don't believe me, just ask the potentially hundreds of thousands of parents who gave their children one of the recently recalled H1N1 children's vaccines. These vaccines were recalled because they were found to be so weak that they were medically useless. But observant parents are noticing a curious fact: Children who received the "useless" (recalled) vaccine have been no worse off than those who received a full-strength vaccine.

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you've pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you're not alone -- for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student's particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning -- Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles) -- reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as "auditory learners" and "visual learners"), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.

Individuals with more education suffer less from asthma. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Respiratory Research have found that having less than 12 years of formal schooling is associated with worse asthma symptoms.

Drs. Kim Lavoie and Simon Bacon from the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to study asthma severity in a group of 871 adult patients. They said, "Lower educational achievement was associated with worse asthma control, greater emergency health service use, and worse asthma self-efficacy. Patients with less than 12 years of education were 55% more likely to report an asthma-related emergency health service visit in the last year."

The researchers suggest that lower education is often a marker of lower socioeconomic status generally, and that this may explain their results. At the individual level, poorer people may have higher exposures to indoor allergens, such as cockroaches, tobacco smoke and mould, and outdoor urban pollution.

The omega-3 essential fatty acids commonly found in fatty fish and algae help animals avoid sensory overload, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. The finding connects low omega-3s to the information-processing problems found in people with schizophrenia; bipolar, obsessive-compulsive, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders; Huntington's disease; and other afflictions of the nervous system.

The study, reported in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, provides more evidence that fish is brain food. The key finding was that two omega-3 fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) appear to be most useful in the nervous system, maybe by maintaining nerve-cell membranes.

"It is an uphill battle now to reverse the message that 'fats are bad,' and to increase omega-3 fats in our diet," said Norman Salem Jr., PhD, who led this study at the Laboratory of Membrane Biochemistry and Biophysics at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Scientists from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston have revealed results from a study outlining some of the effects of artificial sweeteners on the body. Conducted on a group of 3,000 women, the results indicated that those who drank two or more artificially-sweetened beverages a day doubled their risk of more-rapid-than-normal kidney function decline.

The study accounted for various other risk factors including the woman's age, her blood pressure, if she smoked, and if she had any other pre-existing conditions such as heart disease or diabetes. The 11-year study evaluated the effects of all sweetened drinks on progressive kidney decline and discovered that two or more diet drinks leads to a two-fold increase in rapid kidney decline incidences.

Though study results did not show any correlation between sugar- or corn syrup-sweetened drinks and the onset of rapid kidney decline, these ingredients are implicated in causing diabetes and obesity and should not be perceived as safe merely because they did not have a direct correlation in this particular study topic.

The December issue of Nature Chemical Biology contains a study that reveals the powerful effect of the green tea component EGCG in preventing and treating serious brain disorders like Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's diseases. When combined with another isolated component, the elements therapeutically eliminate the protein amyloids which are thought to cause these brain diseases.

Amyloid plaques are tightly-bound protein sheets that make their way into the brain and occupy nerve cells. Sometimes they literally bind themselves around the brain tissue. Consequently, brain cells lose their oxygen source and begin to die, leading to memory and speech loss, diminished motor skills, and eventually death.

Researchers from Boston Biomedical Research Institute (BBRI) and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that two chemical components, one found in green tea, were able to break up the amyloid plaques and restore normal cell function in samples similar to what would be found in patients with brain disorders. The combination was found to be effective at eradicating all kinds of amyloids.

If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids, which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack. But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as The Most Important Fish in the Sea.

Addiction disorders of various kinds are a major health and social problem, and our knowledge of how the brain's reward system functions needs to be enhanced. Uppsala researchers now shows an unexpected effect of the signal substance glutamate on the midbrain in mice. The study is published in the Web edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS.

"We have found that a certain part of the brain's reward system requires not only the signal substance dopamine, as was previously thought, but also glutamate" says Ĺsa Mackenzie, who directed the study at the Department of Neuroscience, Uppsala University.

Among other things, the dopamine nerve cells in the midbrain are important for the brain's control of willed movements and for the brain's "reward system." The latter in turn is important for providing us with a feeling of pleasure and happiness, for example, when we have eaten, worked out, or been affirmed. The feeling itself is mediated by dopamine released from the midbrain's dopamine-producing nerve cells to the brain's limbic system.

If you paint, dance or play a musical instrument -- or just enjoy going to the theatre or to concerts -- it's likely that you feel healthier and are less depressed than people who don't, a survey of nearly 50,000 individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds from a county in mid-Norway shows.

The findings are drawn from the latest round of studies conducted for the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, or HUNT, which used questionnaires, interviews, clinical examinations and the collection of blood and urine samples to assemble detailed health profiles of 48,289 participants.

"There is a positive relationship between cultural participation and self-perceived health for both women and men, "says Professor Jostein Holmen, a HUNT researcher who presented the findings, which have not yet been published, at a Norwegian health conference in Stjørdal in late November. "For men, there is also a positive relationship between cultural participation and depression, in that there is less depression among men who participate in cultural activities, although this is not true for women."