LINCOLN Some people might see Darren Hellman of Lincoln "and think 'Oh, that person is just crazy," said Katrina Hellman.

"I see it differently," she said.

She sees her husband, who has a disease that is so rare that even some doctors don't know about it.

He has frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), aform of dementia characterized by brain atrophy and gradual loss of brain function. The disease frequently is initially diagnosed as either Alzheimer's disease or a psychiatric problem.

"It's a very uncommon condition," said Dr. Tom Ala, Darren's neurologist and associate professor of neurology and interim medical director of the Center for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders at SIU School of Medicine, Springfield. Ala has about 25 patients with FTD and, over the years, has had about 100. Symptoms and severity vary.

"It's not a new disease but people are becoming more aware of it," Ala said.

While Alzheimer's hallmark symptom is memory loss, FTD is primarily a disease of behavior and language dysfunction, according to the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration.

Patients exhibit behavioral and personality changes, such as lack of concern for social norms, while retaining memory of daily events and orientation to time and space, the association said.

FTD also begins earlier than Alzheimer's. Darren is 51. His symptoms began to appear 6 years ago.

During a March 29 visit with the Hellmans and Darren's sister, Deanna Hellman-Baker of Tremont in the Hellmans' home, Darren was open and conversational but frequently forgot words.

The former welder, welding inspector and manufacturing line technician forgot words like "semi-trucks," "math," "drafting," "supervisor" and "valves."

He would remember words after he was reminded by Katrina or Deanna or if he looked them up.

"That's why I have a smartphone...," Darren said. "I use the smartphone to help me remember names and addresses and facts for life. I write things and eventually put it on my smartphone and use it as a reference."

Darren frequently connects his thoughts with the phrase "and oh" even though the thoughts are only tangentially related.

Darren no longer understands humor; doesn't pick up on social cues, such as when his wife and sister want to move the conversation along; and sometimes fixates on certain things.

"I hurt for him," said Katrina, who married Darren on May 2, 2009, in what was the second marriage for both.

She looked at Darren as she spoke. He continued to show visitors a video on his smartphone, oblivious to his wife's poignant remarks.

"This was not what we had planned," Katrina continued. "This is not what we thought married life would be."

Darren was reared in Lincoln, received a degree in metals and manufacturing from Illinois State University in Normal and worked for companies in the Chicago area. The couple, with son Joshua, now 6, moved to Lincoln in 2015.

Katrina first noticed symptoms in 2010, when the couple was living in Crystal Lake.

"The initial symptom was irritability," Katrina recalled. "I assumed it was because he was working third shift and taking care of Joshua while I was at work during the day. He was unable to manage his sleep and wake time."

The next symptom was a decline in language.

"One of the things I noticed was I couldn't remember peoples' names," Darren recalled. "I was like, 'Oh,' and I couldn't remember everything at work. My head was cloudy."

Darren was diagnosed with sleep apnea. But sister Deanna noticed he couldn't remember names of longtime family friends. Katrina realized it was more when Darren brought a dead raccoon into the yard and wasn't sure what to do with it.

Compulsive behavior, such as excessive hand washing, became magnified.

His Chicago-area neurologist conducted tests and concluded that Darren had dementia. A second battery of tests at Mayo Clinic concluded he had non-hereditary version of FTD.

"My reaction is 'Oh, I didn't understand. Well, it's nice to have a diagnosis,'" Darren said.

"I'd never heard of it so I got on the computer and researched it," Katrina said. "There was a relief because we had an answer but it was terrible because I knew our lives would continue to change dramatically."

No longer able to safely work in his field, Darren was approved for disability. "I didn't want to (stop working) but the neurologist didn't want me fired," Darren said.

"I was coming to the end of my rope," admitted Katrina, who quit her job as a sales professional when the couple moved to Lincoln, where Darren's parents live.

Katrina drives a school bus and helps family friends with farming to help make ends meet. Darren's parents, his sister and brother-in-law and Katrina's parents who also recently moved to Lincoln help with Joshua.

"Joshua knows that Daddy has dementia," Katrina said. "He's a very bright young boy."

"We all rallied around Joshua," Deanna said. "We try to fill in the gaps where needed. My husband has become his buddy ... Darren was very receptive to that."

"Moving to a small community where people already knew him and were familiar with his behavior changes helped," Katrina said.

There is no cure, Ala said, so treatments are focused on mitigating symptoms, a Mediterranean diet and exercise to keep the body as healthy as possible.

Katrina and Deanna have organized a support group for caregivers of people with frontotemporal degeneration.

"I knew I needed it and that others needed it, too," Katrina said. The group meets at 10 a.m. on the fourth Saturday of each month at First United Methodist Church, Tremont.

According to the association, people with FTD can live as long as 20 years after diagnosis but the average is 6to 7 years.

"We don't know," Ala said of Darren's prognosis. "But he is atypical. He's had a very mild course and he has done well, which suggests to me and I hope that he has many good years ahead of him."

Follow Paul Swiech on Twitter: @pg_swiech

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A form of dementia but not Alzheimer's - Bloomington Pantagraph

After dropping 300 lbs., Mama June Shannon is determined to maintainher weight loss by sticking to a healthy diet.

The reality star, 37,had already made one major diet change in 2014 cutting out soda when her daughter Pumpkin suffered a brain injury after the family got into a car crash,and was told by the neurologist she could no longer drink the sugary beverage.

I was drinking three to four Code Reds a day, and I just went cold turkey that day, Shannon tells People Now.

Shannons trainerKenya Crooks suggests swapping soda for fruit-infused water.

For people who dont like to drink water by itself, what weve done is weve thrown some strawberries and kiwi in there, says Crooks. Its really good, and it helps you get it down a whole lot faster.

When Shannon is short on time, she drinks Propel flavored waters as a substitute for her formerly beloved sodas.

Propel has great flavors like Grape and Wild Cherry and Kiwi Strawberry, she says Honestly to me, they taste like soda. If I drink soda right now it would taste like crap.

Crooks also recommends replacing unhealthy sweet treats like cupcakes with watermelon to curb sugar cravings.

The cool thing about watermelon is that its basically 92 percent liquid, he says. It satisfies your sweet tooth, but you can also pee-pee that thing right out!

Instead of reaching for potato chips, Crooks suggestssnacking on apple chips or grapes which have become Shannons go-tosnack.

Grapes are probably my favorite thing, says Shannon, who adds that her daughters prefer snacking on watermelon. The grapes the girls actually like, but the watermelon more so than the grapes.

For anyone who wants to start their own weight loss journey, Shannon offered her advice: Take it one day at a time, she says. Dont ever give up. You dont have to be perfect, just take it at the pace you want to. Its all in moderation, especially the eating!

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Mama June & Her Trainer Kenya Crooks Reveal Her Diet Tricks That Are Helping Her Stay Fit - PEOPLE.com

I thought after I reached a certain age I wouldnt have to worry about dieting any more.

I mean, I wouldnt be caught dead in those cute short shorts and halter tops the girls wear these days anyway. Not at my age. So after decades of watching what, how much, and even when I ate, when I turned older, I pretty much devoured whatever I wanted. I figured, as the years crept up, some doctor would put me on a sugar-free, salt-free, taste-free health diet at any time, so enjoy those burgers and cream puffs now.

But my husband suddenly decided he wanted to lose the weight hed accumulated over the years. Hearing that from a gourmet cook was hard to stomach, since Im the recipient of his gastronomic flare and didnt relish to going back to fending for myself. I dont even remember how to cook Top Ramen.

Since my husband knew he couldnt do it on his own, he researched various diet plans and decided to go with the kind that sends you packaged meals and all you have to do is tear them open, add water (or air), and eat your three-quarters cup of reconstituted freeze-dried astronaut-like food. No-brainer. And no-gainer. Just weight loss.

I wanted to support him I know its not easy when one-half of a couple is on a diet and the other eats everything in sight but I decided to let him try it out before I joined him. After all, those all-you-cant-eat packaged diets arent cheap. So on Day One, while he swallowed his mini-shake, munched on his tiny crunchy bar and dissolved his mouthful of chicken soup, I figured Id just cut back on my regular food and do just as well.

Day One was actually exciting. Theres nothing like the feeling of starting a new diet, with all the early morning, not-hungry-yet resolve and energy.

I can do this, I told myself, as I ate half my normal breakfast serving of fruit, bagel, cream cheese, juice, latte and whatever was leftover from lasts night dinner. I allowed myself a mocha frappuccino for lunch no fat, no sugar, no whip, mostly ice with a side of hunger pangs, had some yogurt and nuts for dinner, then went to bed and dreamed about Las Vegas-style resort buffets all night.

Day Two, my husband was still opening packages and eating his quota. Meanwhile, I stepped on the scale and was horrified to find I hadnt lost any weight at all! What was the point? I wondered. All that suffering and nothing to show for it. I gave my diet one more chance and ate crumbs, while my husband enjoyed his packaged food and pretended it tasted like a five-star meal.

By Day Three my husband had lost six pounds and Id gained two. My method obviously wasnt working. My box of packaged food arrives in a couple of days. That gives me plenty of time to eat myself into a stupor before I get to rip open bags of Poultry with Grain, Fish in Sauce and Noodles with Legumes.

Oh well. Hopefully its better than hospital food.

Reach Penny Warner at http://www.pennywarner.com.

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Valley Life: Embarking on my latest culinary adventure a diet - East Bay Times

FOX 32 NEWS - If someone told you that you could increase your memory and decrease your chances of dementia by changing your diet, would you do it?

Rush University researchers say they have developed a diet which is the only one proven to have an impact on Alzheimers disease.

So now, they're asking people to volunteer for a new study to determine just how effective it really is.

Max and Sandy are whipping up brain food. Theyre part of a study to determine how a change in diet can not only help their memory, but decrease their chances of dementia and Alzheimers.

"Watching my mother go through Alzheimers was motivation and I wished back then we had focused on these sorts of triggers."

The triggers are food. Its something that hasn't really been the focus of studies when it comes to our brains and memory. That is until now.

Martha Claire Morris is a Nutritional Epidemiologist and wanted to see how a variation in combining two popular diets - the Mediterranean Diet and the Dash Diet to treat hypertension - would impact brain disease.

"We took the core components of those very well studied diets and then modified each one of their components to reflect what we know about nutrition and brain, said Morris.

And that's when she coined this new diet, the mind diet. In two studies published in 2015, Morris and colleagues found the mind diet lowered the risk of Alzheimers by a whopping 53% in people who followed it rigorously.

And surprisingly, even those who only followed it moderately experienced an impressive benefit.

"People who even scored in intermediate range they had a 35% reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimers disease."

The Mind Diet includes eating at least three servings of whole grains, a green leafy salad and one other vegetable every day along with a glass of wine.

It also includes snacking on most days on nuts and eating beans every other day, fish once a week, poultry and specifically berries at least twice a week.

The foods to limit or avoid are butter, cheese, fried or fast foods and pastries and sweets.

This first of its kind study is tracking more than 600 people over 3-years who are 65-85. But Harris says she believes the Mind Diet can benefit almost anyone.

"It's very likely the Mind diet will be a health benefit to adults of any age and even for children. It's just that we just devised the diet and it hasn't been tested, Harris said.

Max and Sandy say they're already feeling healthier.

"This is the way we will probably eat forever"

Researchers are looking for more people to take part in this study.

Continue reading here:
New diet decreases your chances of getting Alzheimer's - Fox 32 Chicago

April 7, 2017 by Darren Curnoe, The Conversation Human brain connectome illustrating axonal nerve fibers determined by the measured directionality of water molecules inside them (Credit: jgmarcelino from Newcastle upon Tyne). Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

It's the mystery of all mysteries of science. Why is it that humans are so unusual compared to all other life? The key to solving this riddle lies in explaining the evolution of our large brains and exceptional intelligence.

For as long as humanity has been contemplating our existence we must surely have been struck by the fact that we are the only species capable of doing so.

I don't believe it's an exaggeration to say that the evolutionary arrival of humankind some 200,000 years ago was a decisive moment in the long history of the universe. After 14 billion years in the making, and in the blink of an eye of cosmological time, human intelligence arrived and gave the universe the ability to comprehend itself.

Maybe this all seems a little too anthropocentric for your taste? Smacks of literary indulgence on my behalf? Perhaps. But the simple matter is that we can't avoid the fact of human uniqueness, and explaining it is tied to understanding the evolution of our extraordinary brainpower.

The eighteenth century British anatomist and creationist Richard Owen, one of Charles Darwin's foremost foes, thought humans were so unusual that we ought to be classified in our own sub-class the 'Archenecephala' as he dubbed it on account of our highly advanced brain.

It rather conveniently stood us apart from the apes, confirming his view of the specialness of humankind.

By the standards of today's biological classifications this would place us in a position in the tree of life above all of the orders of mammals, making us about as exceptional as the monotremes are to the placentals.

But with the facts of our evolution now well and truly established we have a much better understanding our place in nature, as members of the primate order, and particularly as African Great Apes.

To really understand how the human brain emerged we must first recognise that we share big brains with other primates. It's our evolutionary inheritance, as primates are among the brainiest of all mammals; when taken kilo for kilo against body size. And apes are especially well endowed in the brains department.

Why? Well, this has been a major puzzle for anthropologists for decades, and the most widely accepted explanation has been the cognitive demands placed on us by living in large social groups; the so-called 'social brain hypothesis' or 'Dunbar's Number'.

The main alternative has been that braininess evolved in response to the demands of sex. Polygynandrous species - where males and females have multiple partners in a given breeding season - possess larger brains than those using other systems of mating, such as a harem or monogamy.

Now a new study by Alex DeCasien and colleagues published in Nature Ecology and Evolution has turned the debate completely on its head. They've found that the kind of diet a primate species consumes offers the best explanation for its brain size.

While this idea is not an entirely new one, their work provides strong validation for the diet-brain connection.

When it comes to apes it turns out that fruit eating - the dietary niche present in most living apes and the one our ancient ape ancestors indulged in - is so cognitively demanding that it led to a big evolutionary leap in intelligence when it began.

How come? Well, challenging diets require individuals to seek out or capture food; they have to judge whether it's ready to be eaten or not; and they may even need to extract it, peel it, or process it in some way before it can be ingested.

Sound familiar? It should. Humans have the most specialised and challenging diets of all primates; and I have in mind here hunters and gatherers not urban foodies.

The human dietary niche is exceptionally broad and involves behaviours aimed at not only obtaining food but also making it more palatable and digestible; activities like extraction, digging, hunting, fishing, drying, grinding, cooking, combining other foods to add flavor, or even adding minerals to season or make food safe to eat.

What other species would so gleefully jiggle their jaws on the flames of a Jalapeno or lap up the tongue curling delights of a lemon?

What's more, our large fruit eating ape brains got even bigger late in human evolution because our diets became ever more challenging to obtain and prepare, especially as a result of our ancestor's penchant for eating meat.

Hunter-gatherers typically have a diet comprising between 30% and 80% vertebrate meat, while for chimpanzees it's only around 2%. Instead, chimps get 60% of their diet from fruit, but hunter-gatherers typically obtain only 5% or 6 % (on the odd occasion a lot more) of their nutrition from fruit.

Humans rarely eat raw meat though, and we cook many of our vegetables as well, so even after expending huge efforts to collect it we still have to process much of our food in drawn out ways.

All of this throws up a paradox for us. Why is it that our closest and now extinct relatives, such as the Neanderthals, who were capable of complex behaviours like hunting, cooking and perhaps even cultural activities like art, lacked the smarts to ponder the ultimate questions of life?

Why is it us, and not them, that are capable of pondering and explaining the existence of life and the universe, including human life itself? There is clearly something very unique about human intelligence and a lot more to this evolutionary tale than mere food for thought.

Explore further: Why are primates big-brained? Researchers' answer is food for thought

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Brain size in primates is predicted by diet, an analysis by a team of New York University anthropologists indicates. These results call into question "the social brain hypothesis," which has posited that humans and other ...

Anthropologists have been curious about the evolution of human intelligence for many decades. The main lines of research have involved archaeological finds concerning the use of fire, tools and so on.

A new mathematical model could help clarify what drove the evolution of large brains in humans and other animals, according to a study published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Monkeys known as macaques possess the vocal anatomy to produce "clearly intelligible" human speech but lack the brain circuitry to do so, according to new research.

The brains of wild cats don't necessarily respond to the same evolutionary pressures as those of their fellow mammals, humans and primates, indicates a surprising new study led by a Michigan State University neuroscientist.

Amateur cook-offs like the hugely popular Master Chef series now in its seventh season in Australia have been part of our TV diet for almost two decades.

Walking through a grassy field or forest take a moment to consider what lies beneath the surface. A web of plant roots interacts symbiotically with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi that extend their hyphae from the root ...

Birds show an amazing diversity in plumage colour and patterning. But what are the genetic mechanisms creating such patterns? In a new study published today in PLOS Genetics, Swedish and French researchers report that two ...

A new study of Peruvian frogs living at a wide variety of elevationsfrom the Amazon floodplain to high Andes peakslends support to the idea that lowland amphibians are at higher risk from future climate warming.

Puffin pairs that follow similar migration routes breed more successfully the following season, a new Oxford University study has found.

(Phys.org)A pair of biology professors, one with the University of Illinois, the other with Macquarie University in Australia has proposed in a Perspective piece in the journal Science that the traits we see as instinctual ...

Humans are able to interpret the behaviour of others by attributing mental states to them (and to themselves). By adopting the perspectives of other persons, they can assume their emotions, needs and intentions and react ...

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Agreed. We have no way of knowing whether Neandertals "lacked the smarts to ponder" anything.

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Food for thought? Diet helps explain unique human brainpower - Phys.Org

Bubba Watson is still adjusting to dropping 15 pounds. (Getty)

Fans tuning into the 2017 Masters will notice a slimmed down Bubba Watson. According to Golf Week, Watson has lost 15-20 pounds. Watson has a current weight of 172 pounds compared to 190 pounds he weighed at the end of last year.

Watson noted the weight loss was a byproduct of eating healthier not necessarily because he was attempting to lose weight. He explained his new diet to Golf Week.

Oh, everything that tastes good. Actually, Im eating small meals more times. I threw in fish for the first time, a lot of chicken. Normally I dont like eating on the golf course, but we made these little protein balls.

No chips. I havent had a chip probably in three or four months. So its just things like that. The stuff everybody loves? I just cut it out. So Im basically just bitter at the world.

Watson has wondered if the weight loss has impacted his game negatively in the short-term, but told Golf Channel its [the weight loss] is going to help me play a lot longer.

Two years ago, it was Chipotle burritos that Watson claimed helped him at Augusta.

Watson explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that he started eating the burritos when his wife was out of town.

Last year, 2014, my wife was there this time. I was like Im going back to the burritos. So I had burritos for another 10 days straight, one or two a day. I won again so I think were going to do that again, Watson told Fallon (via Golf Digest).

Gone are his burrito days, but Watson hopes his new health will help him at Augusta. It is worth noting the burritos did not help him in 2015 as Watson finished 38th. Watson has yet to win during the 2017 Tour and his best finish came at the 2016 Hero World Challenge where he placed sixth.

Watson has won two green jackets during his career. He won the Masters in 2012 and 2014.

Thomas Pieters is a sleeper to compete in the 2017 Masters. Learn more about the Belgian golfer who played collegiately at Illinois.

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Bubba Watson Weight Loss 2017: New Diet Slims Down Watson - Heavy.com