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Wednesday, 29 May, 2013
Silent strokes, a quiet killer
In this 7th part of the weekly research commentary series by Duke-NUS faculty, Dean Ranga Krishnan highlights a type of stroke, where signs of its occurrence are often missed, and its relation to depression in the elderly. The strokes are also frequently associated with memory impairment and lead to a form of dementia - vascular dementia. He also explained that controlling blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar in mid-life, and not smoking, may be the key to preventing silent strokes and dementia.
Dean Krishnan chaired the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Duke University Medical Centre from 1998 to 2009. He has written three books, more than 50 textbook chapters and more than 200 journal articles on the subjects of elderly depression, dementia, Alzheimer disease, panic disorder, bipolar disorder in late life and obsessive-compulsive disorder, among others. In the late 1990s, he identified and described the pathology of a then little-known condition called vascular depression, in which small strokes in the mood centers of the brain give rise to a unique type of depression.
TODAY, May 29, 2013
Earlier commentaries by Duke-NUS research faculty may be found in this section under News.