Dad’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s stayed hidden from everyone until I took over the medical administration of my parents in 2015. Once I found out, there was a deafening silence from most of the people I know even though virtually all of them would add, “My _____ had Alzheimer’s…” But there was little help, little beyond people sadly shaking heads. Or horror stories. Lots of those. Even the ones who knew about the disease seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Alzheimer’s Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this part of my blog…
Basic research
into cures, treatments, and palliatives (things that may not cure or treat, but
make a victim feel better) has recently gone “haywire”.
At one point, “neural
tangles”, present in most brain autopsies seemed to be The Cause.
Then it was “amyloid
plaques”, also present in most brain autopsies.
Four months ago,
this was published: “Age-related dementias will affect almost 10% of
people in the United States, and these conditions place a tremendous burden on
such individuals and their families. The most prevalent type of dementia,
Alzheimer's disease (AD), causes a devastating and progressive loss of
cognition, for which there is no effective treatment or cure. Analyses of the
brains of people with AD suggest that the presence of extracellular aggregates
of amyloid-β peptides, intracellular inclusions of neurofibrillary tangles rich
in microtubule-associated protein tau and neuritic plaques are pathological
hallmarks of the disease, yet there is no conclusive link between these
observations and the cognitive symptoms. The inability to definitively connect
progressive memory loss to biomarkers greatly impedes the quest for effective
therapeutic interventions for AD, but enhanced efforts to understand mechanisms
of cognitive decline are revealing new avenues for intervention.”
Summed up and
condensed, this says, “We have no idea what causes Alzheimer’s or how to deal
with it. Oh, and one person in ten will have to deal with this thing.”
Because Alzheimer’s
affects so many people – and that it knows absolutely NO BOUNDARIES racially,
economically, societally, regionally, or behaviorally – more and more
individuals and companies are joining in the research. According to the article
below, “So far, confirmation of a subset of the newly identified loci in
functional experiments has demonstrated that lipid processing, endocytosis and
inflammation might contribute substantially to the development of AD.”
This means that
how our bodies process fat; how old cells are absorbed back into the body, and
swelling of brain tissue may ALSO play a role in whether or not I will be
affected by Alzheimer’s as my father is.
The upshot is that
Alzheimer’s is COMPLICATED: in addition to the formation of amyloid plaques and
neural tangles – which is where much of the drug research has been aimed and
tested – treatment and cure has to ALSO consider how old cells are absorbed
back into the body, the swelling of brain tissue, dysfunction of the immune system,
disruption in the brain’s physical “circuitry”, as well as how stress affects the hippocampus of
the brain (thought to be the center of emotion, memory, and the autonomic
nervous system)…
It’s clear to me
after reading this that not only is Alzheimer’s a complex disease, it will also
not be affected by a prescription: it involves diet early in life, stress
management, and the actual stimulation of the brain along with implantation of
electrodes as well as genetics and simply how each Human body acts and reacts
to aging.
As to the initial
idea for this post, my brother mentioned that he was talking to a nurse who
said that another reason for sundowning is that when my dad got home from work
each night, he started to depend on my mom to take care of him. Sundowning
triggers that “historical helplessness”. While it seems to make sense – in a
BIG way – I haven’t been able to find any articles or mentions of it in the
lit. That doesn’t negate it as a theory, certainly. It just means that the
whole field of Alzheimer’s treatment is growing – if not chaotically, at least
in observational and experimental data…
Resource: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sundown.htm,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v539/n7628/full/nature20412.html
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