What a crock of sh1t.

Do you rub it into your skull?

Congratulations, this wins the stupidest comment on the internet today.

So the story is: some random Dr. named Mary Newport gave her husband coconut oil and claimed that he showed signs of improvement. From this one non-scientific, uncontrolled personal example she concluded that coconut oil can cure Alzheimer's.

Awesome. Obviously, everyone should follow her example. lol.

This is just junk science. Because people who enjoy crossword puzzles, reading, are articulate, etc and are also less apt to have serious cognitive problems in late life does NOT mean that working crossword puzzles can stave off Alzheimer's. Period. It has been known for around 3500 years that "correlation does not equal causation."

And any indication that deposits of plaques in the brain cause Alzheimer's is equally foolish.

At this point in science, researchers have absolutely no idea whether plaques cause Alzheimer's, whether Alzheimer's causes plaques, or whether a common abnormality causes both.

It is far more likely that there are very early symptoms of cognitive decline that are almost impossible to measure but are serious enough that crossword puzzles, for example, are not nearly as enjoyable.

There has been a great deal of research on the "brain age" games and software that purported to prevent cognitive decline. People who did the little games and puzzles daily were tracked and had exactly the same rate of decline as people who played games for an equal amount of time and people who did neither.

It's easy to spot this sort of junk science because, in order to "prevent" cognitive decline, you have to make lifestyle changes BEFORE any symptoms appear. This means that it is both impossible to validate the claim and is absolutely worthless as an intervention.

These articles take rather mundane findings from "data mining" and interpret them in ways that are absolutely wrong. There are literally thousands of grad students and physicians pretending to be researchers who take existing data, often from unrelated studies and studies that would invalidate the results, and looking for correlations. And, I will tell you for a fact --- if you look for correlations, you will find correlations. Because A is linked to B and B is linked to C, there is NO automatic link between A and C. This is caused surrogate endpoint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_endpoint Any time you use a surrogate endpoint being postulated --- in this case that working crossword puzzles can slow cognitive decline --- you can safely disregard it. What is represented is a correlation --- that the twothings are related in some unknown way --- and not a causation --- that one thing causes the other.

Surrogate endpoints are a favorite of physicians working for the FDA and drug companies, and who have no background in science, to explain their "hunches." I asked a statistician who worked for SAS once about the subject and was told that surrogate endpoints are like saying that it takes eight pancakes to cover a doghouse because a fish doesn't have pedals and proving it by saying that a bicycle can't swim.

Sorry for the rant, but this sort of junk article is intended to sell media under the false flag of educating the public. Mostly they do it by raising false hopes or distorting the research itself.

LOL Guess whose wife is a PhD gerontologist/researcher?

My father was an avid reader and puzzle person most of his life, but it did not stop or even slow this terrible disease. To have lived such an interesting life and not be able to remember it had to have been a terrible thing for him to go through. Finding a real solution is definitely what is needed.

It's not a "one size fits all" solution - it's not even a solution, just a step in the right direction. It's definitely not "silly". Plus, how can it hurt to keep your brain active? My grandmother knitted, stitched, read, did crossword puzzles, wrote notes, whatever all her life and until the day she died her mind was awesome - her body was gone, but the mind was still there. On the other hand, my grandfather was an active man, he was outside all the time working and walking and exercise is good for your brain, keeping it healthy and stimulated - he developed Alzheimer's at the end of his life and it was awful. Just because your father/grandmother/mother/whomever had a different experience doesn't automatically make this study or its conclusions bunk. The brain is immensely complex and will never be fully understood.

Keeping Alzheimers out of the equation.................doing cognitive skills like puzzles, word games, reading...................any kind of mental challenges can do everyone a world of good............especially as they age. Even learning to play video games, using Wii, can only help. Otherwise your brain ceases to function properly. Vegetables are only meant to be eaten. Not becoming one is a challenge.

It's comparable to saying that those who exercise regularly are less likely to have heart problems. That is unquestionably true, yet everyone knows or knows of someone who was very active yet died young of a severe heart attack. Lifestyle factors are not the only things that control our destiny - but for many of us, those who are not extremely lucky or unlucky in terms of genetics or environmental exposures, they are at least relevant. (Also, it's not clear whether engaging in more mental activities throughout life is a cause of better mental function, or a result of having better mental function thanks to good genes, good early nutrition, etc. Smarter people may have more buffer capacity so that they are more slowly affected by this awful disease. Your grandmother may not have had the opportunity to learn Greek, but she may have been just as smart as your father - or he might have had other risk factors that would have caused him to succumb at a younger age had he not kept mentally active.)

@jane,

Good post. And using your brain to actually think is what it is all about. The actual research paper (you can read the abstract online) says that it studied a "Volunteer sample of 65 healthy older individuals (mean age, 76.1 years), 10 patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) (mean age, 74.8 years), and 11 young controls (mean age, 24.5 years) were studied from October 31, 2005, to February 22, 2011." This is hardly a definitive study and has a serious problem --- AD can only be accurately diagnosed POST MORTEM. It also had issues with its conclusion that "Individuals with greater early- and middle- life cognitive activity had lower C]PiB uptake. The tendency to participate in cognitively stimulating activities is likely related to engagement in a variety of lifestyle practices that have been implicated in other studies showing reduced risk of AD-related pathology. We report a direct association between cognitive activity and C]PiB uptake, suggesting that lifestyle factors found in individuals with high cognitive engagement may prevent or slow deposition of β-amyloid, perhaps influencing the onset and progression of AD."

When conclusions in an article are liberally salted with "tendency" "likely" "perhaps" and "association" (which means that they occur together, not that they are even correlated) you can be assured that there is no real science there. In psychology right now, it is much invogue to try to connect what happens with the mind (the cognitive process) with what happens in the brain using PET scans. This is very valuable information as we catalolg how the intellectual process matches the physical process, but there is a lot of over-reaching going on in its use.

I have a friend who specializes in this area and he can show you a picture (of a man lying face down in the street with no further indications) for 5 seconds and then tell you whether you consider yourself Republican or Democrat and how you would vote on a ton of issues from personhood to women's rights to gun ownership. All he does is watch what parts of your brain "light up" in reaction to the picture. Democrats light up the same areas that a picture of a kitten would light up. For Republicans, it lights up a part of the brain that deals with threats and sets the fight or flight reaction. It's a fascinating subject, but the reference article is complete BS.