Just read this MSNBC article and thought it worth passing on.
To anyone who has seen someone develop Alzheimer’s, you know how devastating it can be.
Hopefully this new drug will work, and be on the market sooner than later!
Sorry, that should read PREVENTION, sadly, not “cure”…
Heh… I was gonna come in here and say, “Wow, you mean they can regenerate brain tissue?! Cool!”
But that’s pretty cool – and it seems to work incredibly fast. Several years ago, my grandmother – the last of my grandparents at the time – developed Alzheimer’s some number of months before her death. I had visited her once when she was perfectly lucid, then again some 6 months later when Alzheimer’s had taken full root, and the difference was staggering. It was like she went from perfectly normal to thinking it was 1975, having no idea who I was or that I had even been there five minutes ago, and oblivious to the half-eaten cookie in her lap. It was a sad transition.
Hopefully this drug will prove itself out.
I hope it proves beneficial, too. It wouldn’t be in time for my poor mom, but it would be in time for me. I’m very much like her in personality, forgetfulness, and other physical and mental attributes, so I’ve been dreading that I’m going to lose my mind, too, as I age. Here’s hoping something will be found to help us boomers before that happens.
I’m in the same situation. My mother as diagnosed last year and it seemed to come on fast, although I realize we just weren’t recognizing the early signs and she was likely masking them from us but there was really no transition phase for us. She was normal and self-sufficient one day and the next she was hospitalized and then had to be put in a ALF. Now everytime I forget something I get worried about myself.
Reading that article about the link between the amyloid protein and the metals made me wonder if my mother’s zinc supplements could have contributed to her degeneration?
There’s work going on in the US along similar lines.
I hope I can get my hands on it. My dad had ALZ and I’m probably more prone to it because of that.
Any treatment is good news for my family, hopefully it will prove a success and be approved sooner rather than later.
My mother has Alzheimer’s, also, and is doing moderately ok. I hope and pray all the time that she’ll just hang on where she is disease-progress-wise until they find more and better medications. One thing I wonder is if they come up with a drug that cures the disease what would happen to her? Would she become cognizant of the years she lost? Would she return to the way she was before the disease? How would people cope? What would it be like to have impaired memory function for years only to have your brain fire back up again?
As I corrected from my OP, if it works this drug PREVENTS or slows the progression, sadly not “cures”…
But if you were talking hypothetically, it would be interesting to see what would happen if all the people with Alzheimer’s could indeed have their memory functions return…my guess is there would be some interesting conversations with family members, both good and bad, regarding what happened after they were diagnosed and the disease progressed. Just speaking from bad experience, but it did bring out the worst in some of the family members.
Well, in the first place, I’d say we don’t know enough about how the brain works to really answer the question, and secondly, I’d say that it depends hugely on your definition of a “cure”. Would it just stop the formation of more plaques in the brain? Would it get rid of the ones already there? Would it somehow cause dead brain cells to regenerate? A cure could consist of anything from just stopping the progression to fully restoring the patient’s brain and personality. It’s not an easy question.
As I said in my reply,* if * they come up with…
If they come up with a drug that just stops the disease progression that would be better than the slow death that Alzheimer’s is now, but it’s still very sad to think she’d be in permanent toddlerhood, disabled but otherwise healthy. She’d easily live another 20-25 years, into her 90’s, but not independent though not entirely gone either.
If they come up with a drug that stops the disease and allows her to have her short-term memory restored but an amnesia-like state for the years she’s lost… obviously much better, but I would think still really really hard for a patient emotionally. Would it be like when you’re put under general anesthesia where you’re cognizant and all of the sudden you wake up and it’s hours later and you can’t remember anything? How do you deal with the fact that you weren’t “there”? Would you feel like a stranger in your own life?
As I said in my reply,* if * they come up with…
If they come up with a drug that just stops the disease progression that would be better than the slow death that Alzheimer’s is now, but it’s still very sad to think she’d be in permanent toddlerhood, disabled but otherwise healthy. She’d easily live another 20-25 years, into her 90’s, but not independent though not entirely gone either.
If they come up with a drug that stops the disease and allows her to have her short-term memory restored but an amnesia-like state for the years she’s lost… obviously much better, but I would think still really really hard for a patient emotionally. Would it be like when you’re put under general anesthesia where you’re cognizant and all of the sudden you wake up and it’s hours later and you can’t remember anything? How do you deal with the fact that you weren’t “there”? Would you feel like a stranger in your own life?
Wow. My first double post ever.
There’s an Alzheimer’s joke in there somewhere…