Patients
Alzheimer's: Searching for a Cure
Alzheimer's: Searching for a Cure
By Linda Bren
It was 1997 when an alarm went off in Vivian Freed's head. She knew something
was wrong with her 85-year old mother, who had always planned her trip to
celebrate Thanksgiving with her children down to the last detail. But that year,
she got the airline tickets for the wrong days. Freed also found out that her
mother had been missing doctors' appointments and social engagements, so she
flew from her home in Rockville, Md., to her mother's home in Florida to check
on her.
"Everything that she had done perfectly before was a mess," says Freed. The
bills weren't paid, and the medications that her mother had been giving to her
ailing father weren't right. "We realized we needed to do something," says
Freed, after a doctor diagnosed her mother with Alzheimer's disease.
Freed's sister, Annette Heller,
later "adult-napped" her parents and moved
them to Maryland under the pretense of just visiting." They didn't really notice
that she was packing up more things than they would need for just a visit," says
Freed.
Her parents were fiercely independent
and would have objected to moving. "It
would have been much nicer to give them closure, but it wasn't possible," Freed
says.
Not long after Freed moved her parents
into an assisted living facility in
Maryland, her father passed away. "The day after he died, Mom remembered what
happened, but never did again," she says. "Mom kept asking, 'Where's
Daddy?'"
As her mother's mental and physical
health continued to deteriorate, Freed moved her into a small group home
where she got 24-hour care. Alzheimer's
disease, along with worsening vision, prevented her mother from recognizing
Freed. "It was a very slow demise," she says. Her mother died at age
90 in 2002.
"Ultimately, Alzheimer's is fatal," says William Thies, Ph.D., vice president
of medical and scientific affairs at the Alzheimer's Association in Chicago.
"Until research provides the answers, Alzheimer's will continue to exact
a terrible toll on those with the disease, as well as on their families, friends
and caregivers."
But an explosion of Alzheimer's research in the last 10 years and its
continuing momentum hold out hope for potential preventions and treatments for
this devastating disease.
Rising Numbers
Health care costs for the roughly 4 million Americans with Alzheimer's
disease (AD) exceed $100 billion a year, according to the Alzheimer's
Association. As baby boomers age during the next few decades, the number of
victims and the dollar costs of care are expected to almost quadruple.
As age increases, so does the risk
of getting AD. For each five-year age group beyond 65, the percentage of
people with AD doubles, according to the
National Institute on Aging (NIA). Nearly half of those over age 85 have it.
A
small number are diagnosed with "early-onset Alzheimer's," which can
strike people in their 30s, but most AD cases are among older people. A person
with AD
lives an average of eight years after the onset of symptoms, but some live as
long as 20 years.
A Disease of the Brain
AD is a brain disorder that occurs gradually. It starts with mild memory
loss, changes in personality and behavior, and a decline in thinking abilities
(cognition). It progresses to loss of speech and movement, then total
incapacitation and eventually death. It is normal for memory to decline and the
ability to absorb complex information to slow as people get older, but AD is not
a part of normal aging.
Researchers aren't exactly sure what causes AD, but they do know that people
with the disease have an abundance of two abnormal structures in the brain:
plaques and tangles. Plaques are dense, sticky substances made up of
accumulations of a protein called beta-amyloid. Tangles are twisted fibers
caused by changes in a protein called tau. The beta-amyloid plaques reside in
the spaces between the billions of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain, and
the neurofibrillary tangles clump together inside the neurons. Plaques and
tangles block the normal transport of the electrical messages between the
neurons that enable us to think, remember, talk and move. As AD progresses,
nerve cells die, the brain shrinks, and the ability to function deteriorates.
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