Battling Alzheimer

We don’t call Alzheimer’s disease “the Monster” for nothing. As recent blog posts suggest, Alzheimer’s terrifies many people. For some, any possible advance in research and treatment is grasped like a straw, or a lifeline. For others, Alzheimer’s disease is a daily, grinding burden as they care for a loved one, or sometimes, face it themselves. For still others, dementia causes them to look at life and their own health in a new way.

We think of Alzheimer’s disease as something that causes people to forget, but for the Memory Bridge project, it’s a call to remember and to bring generations closer. They’ve developed interview questions that are used for the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project, a school curriculum, and a highly-recommended documentary.

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An article published in Neurology, December 11, 2007, suggests that more than 85% of older Americans have some form of brain disease, even if they have no symptoms. In other words, you can have the plaques and tangles in your brain which are typical of Alzheimer’s disease, and practically speaking, it may not be Alzheimer’s. That is, it may not affect your behavior or thinking at all.

The study done at the Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, like the Nun Study of Dr. David Snowdon, involved dissecting brains, not living people. Both studies came to similar conclusions about multiple causes for dementia. I recall Snowdon’s surprise when he discovered that the brain of one sharp, intelligent participant was full of Alzheimers’s-like structures. His conclusion, and the conclusion of the Rush University researchers, was that if you never have a stroke, symptoms of dementia may never appear.

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