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IN YOUR PRIME
Alzheimer's: Is There Treatment?
Q. A friend says her husband was diagnosed with early Alzheimer's but a
nurse told her, "We now have a number of drugs to handle the problem." Is
this true?
A. It is far from accurate. Presently, there are four drugs that help
Alzheimer's patients somewhat. But, the degree of
improvement varies from patient to patient. With or without the use of
drugs, your friend will need emotional support and physical assistance.
Moreover, you must impress upon her-again and again-the time will
come when she must seek outside, professional help. Caring for an
Alzheimer's patient is a 24-hour burden, seven days a week, 365 days a
year. It is not an assignment for one woman, or man.
Beginning with some positive information, here is what we know: the
normal human brain weighs about three pounds, and consists of perhaps a
hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. In sum, the brain is a powerful
electrochemical engine (just two percent of the body's weight, the organ
nonetheless requires 20 percent of its energy consumption) that works
marvelously well most of the time.
Author Robin Marantz Henig has written, "Most people do not go senile, no
matter how long they live." Her message, in "The Myth of Senility" (An
AARP book; 1988), was that Alzheimer's, one form of dementia, is not a
natural result of aging.
Instead, Alzheimer's is a degenerative brain disease and, sadly, is both fatal
and without cure or effective, lasting therapy. The demographics are
sobering: today close to five million adults are sick with Alzheimer's, while
predictions say 14 million could be victimized by 2020 if nothing is done to
thwart the epidemic. For these reasons, Alzheimer's is called America's
"demographic time bomb."
What actually happens inside the brain to frustrate memory and ultimately
rob the person of his or her identity? Writing in "The Forgetting/
Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic" (Doubleday; 2001), David Shenk
describes the trouble that begins in the cerebral cortex:
"Portions... become steadily clouded with two forms of cellular debris:
clumpy brown spherical plaques floating between the neurons, and long
black stringy tangles choking neurons from inside their cell membranes."
It is the telltale "plaques" and "tangles" that spread, causing disruption and
harm wherever they travel within the brain. Alzheimer's, on average,
continues for some eight years until death occurs.
Two forces, or dynamics, have recently provoked a stir, or flutter,
throughout the Alzheimer's community. First, there is genuine, measurable
progress being recorded by basic researchers into all the brain diseases.
"There's a smell of success in the air," one scientist told David Shenk.
Consider, our understanding of Alzheimer's has grown, to the point there
now is a national strategy: delay the onset by five years!
Additionally, the insatiable American quest for a single solution-an alleged
magic elixir, or pill-has become a fever, and so charlatans and some
misguided patients continue to promote these bogus "cures", namely:
Unrefined sea salt, flaxseed oil, mistletoe, red grapes, turmeric, essiac tea,
chlorela algae, barley grass, shark cartilage, olive leaf extract, acupuncture,
electromagnetic pulse therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ultraviolet blood
irradiation, and deep massage of the feet.
Now, the first dynamic is positive. The latter, while folly, is to be expected
where medical science has too little to offer. Meantime, burdened caregivers
hope for respite or relief, scanning their newspaper for the hint of a
breakthrough.
Author and journalist Charles P. Pierce, who's father died of Alzheimer's,
believes the disease must be met with the "only kind of charity appropriate
to it-the charity of absolute honesty." He writes in "Hard To Forget"
(Random House; 2000) that this becomes "the hardest lesson of all to learn."
Keeping this injunction in mind, we offer a layman's forecast: Alzheimer's
will be defeated by our best scientific minds-just not anytime soon.
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