The horror of Alzheimer's is that you can physically live for decades with very little cognitive function or personality left. Living 12 years after onset doesn't prove anything.

Going to the source, you can also find that a follow-up study with 150ish participants was published this month. It seems like decent research and the journals publishing it are legit.

Well spotted. I looked up the original article, as I always do, because a good 95% of the time these stories are reported misleadingly. I spotted that the journal is seriously dubious and the thyme oil was "donated", but missed the fact in my skim-read that there was not even any statistical benefit for the thyme oil.

Not to always be the Cold Hard Science person, but:

The sample size for this isn't appalling at all. For an invasive, intensive, and expensive-to-run study, like this, it's very respectable. The firm extrapolations from it that can be made, however, will be limited by the sample size, as people working in the field will know. If it were really that "appalling",…

For a study this invasive, that's pretty good. I mean, if you're just getting people to complete surveys or following up on outpatient treatment outcomes, you want a participant no. in the hundreds, but for a study where participants were provided with every meal AND had their urine and faeces regularly tested, that's…

I am loving the coining of "pseuicides". Nice work.

This troll is weak and a loser, but I did at least get an incredulous laugh out of the "women don't say cunt" bit. I was almost tempted to respond just to assert my happy existence as a very much female, pregnant in fact, proud cunt-saying lady. (And another rape survivor, so whatever, trolldude.)

Nothing like a family singalong to "Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a Me".

You could be right. But if some of these guys get out? I don't know. And it does seem that they get some kind of validation from the murderers' notoriety.

Yeah, I get that. But evidently a lot of people (including Jez readers) did assume that it came from data-mining pregnancy-related purchases, and I can understand why.

Well, the size of the snafu and the fact it was sent to reams of people, including men, who aren't even proximally connected to child-having wasn't clear at first. Women who've suffered a miscarriage, stillbirth or repeated fertility problems probably presumed Shutterfly had bought data showing them as pregnant…

What IS the psychology of women who fall in love with and marry imprisoned murderers? Like, pursue them aggressively in many cases? I understand lots of the weird kinks of human psychology, but this one has me puzzled. Saying it's just "I can change him" cranked up to 11 seems simplistic.

Yeah, you can see both my ribs and hipbones fairly clearly, and I have more than enough "fat to be healthy". I just store it different places, mostly my thighs and arse with a side of boobs.

No way! First time I've ever run across another Jezzie in the vicinity. Hi!

I'm stuck with freakin' Popeye, dude. Every damn afternoon. That's what I get for living down the road from a school, probably. (I'm in Brixton, south London.)

The one that torments my street in London every afternoon plays the "Popeye" theme. Over and over and over. I live in the most diverse borough in the city, FWIW.

Honestly, I think it's just that babies have a simple grabbing reflex (the palmar grasp reflex) from birth. It's likely that as one twin brushed the other during/after birth the reflex was activated. I mean, we can map our own "they luv each other" story on the top, but as much as I love a good squee, I'm frustrated…

Twins, whether identical or fraternal, very rarely share an amniotic sac (thus the newsworthiness of this "monoamniotic" birth), and when they do it's a major risk to the pregnancy; frequently it can result in the death of one or both twins (40-70%). I learned about this when Dustin at Pajiba wrote about his…

Yeah, well, at least we're using the right WORD! :)