A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity

New York Times, By Sandra Blakeslee, April 8

If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for “The Twilight Zone,” odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last year.

Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school.

According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing drive to paint.

“Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,” said Robert Adams, a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where they lived.

[...]

Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.

“We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” Dr. Miller said. “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger.”

Washington Post, By Steven Reinberg, April 9

Men who develop diabetes in middle age may be at greater risk of Alzheimer's disease, a Swedish study finds.

"Our results have important public health implications given the increasing numbers of people developing diabetes and the need for more powerful interventions," study author Dr. Elina Ronnemaa, of Uppsala University, said in a statement.

The study included nearly 2,300 Swedish men who had glucose testing at age 50 to check for diabetes, a metabolic disease caused by abnormal insulin levels. The men were then followed for 32 years. The results: 102 were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, 57 with vascular dementia, and 235 with other types of dementia or cognitive impairment, the researchers said.

The study found that the men with low insulin levels at age 50 were nearly one-and-a-half times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than men who didn't have insulin problems. The risk of Alzheimer's increased, regardless of blood pressure, cholesterol, body-mass index and education.