Possum Philosophy: The ongoing battle against Alzheimer’s

By ROBERT CAHILL/Columnist

Were my mother still alive today, on Wednesday, Sept. 10, she would turn 81 years old. Sadly, she passed away in April 2004. Although by then she had several health problems, her primary one was Alzheimer’s.
Several years ago, my good friend and primary care physician, Dr. Wayne Reynolds, and I were discussing Alzheimer’s Disease. At the time, I had just read an article on it and its early symptoms. I don’t even remember how the good doctor and I got on the subject. Dr. Reynolds said then that he feared we would one day see an epidemic of this insidious disease. His primary worry was there was little research being done toward medications to alleviate the symptoms or cure it. We were both interested in it primarily from an academic point of view. Little did we realize then that we would both soon be much more familiar with this sinister killer.
For those of you not familiar with the disease, here are a few facts from the Alzheimer’s Organization Web site (http://www.alz.org). Alzheimer’s, named for Dr. Alois Alzheimer, is a progressive and fatal brain disease that afflicts more than five million Americans today. So many so that currently it is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
There are other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia, which is caused by restricted blood flow to parts of the brain. However, Alzheimer’s is now the most common form of dementia in this country. (Dementia is a generic term for loss of memory and intellectual ability enough to seriously interfere with the sufferer’s life in numerous ways.) There is also mixed dementia where one suffers from both vascular and Alzheimer’s dementia.
As we age all of us slow down. And like the rest of the body, the brain also slows a bit. A small amount of memory loss, the occasional inability to remember someone’s name, forgetting where one left their car keys, things like this are normal. But memory loss enough that it adversely affects the way one works and lives is not. According to the Alzheimer’s Web site, the brain has over 100 billion nerve cells. These work together in networks that facilitate our thoughts and movements. Each network has a specific function.
Some run the body’s physical plant, taking in food, processing it into energy, distributing this energy on an as-needed basis. Others run the senses. Still others run the muscle and movement division. Some take care of thinking, learning and memory. But all of them must work together for things to run right. While a minor glitch in the system occasionally may be an aggravation, it happens.
Sadly, with Alzheimer’s, it is not an occasional glitch; it is a breakdown in the system. Unfortunately, scientists are not sure where this trouble starts. Unfortunately, problems in one area of the brain lead to problems in other areas as well. Cells lose the ability to do the work they should and eventually die. 
Like most all Southern boys I thought there was no one like my Mom. She was a beautiful woman, though she never thought so and always tried to avoid having her picture taken. She was also highly intelligent. She had an overwhelming love of reading. She had been awarded a scholarship to Radford University where she planned to study to become a librarian. However, she fell in love and married, always planning to go to school “a little later.” But after a few years along came a family and she became a full-time mother.
She had one of the most kind, loving and forgiving personalities of anyone I ever met. She was almost always pleasant even to her miscreant sons. ( Of course to hear her and my sister tell it, the one girl in the family naturally never misbehaved. Yeah… right.) All our friends loved her almost as much as her kids did. Many even called her Momma, which pleased her to no end.
Sadly, in the matter of a few years, we watched as this insidious disease transformed her from the intelligent homemaker she was for many years to an almost child-like person. Her short-term memory was destroyed. She might ask a simple question half a dozen times in an hour or less. Oddly, her memory of her childhood days was much better.
Alzheimer’s sufferers often undergo vast changes in personality. They can become argumentative or downright mean. I remember talking with one lady whose mother had developed Alzheimer’s and had taken to shouting obscenities in anger. Her daughter told me how she would never have suspected her mother knew such language, much less would use it and how embarrassed her mother would be if realized what she was doing. Some sufferers even become physically violent even to their most loved ones.
We were lucky in one small way. Mom just seemed to get even sweeter as this horrible disease progressed. During one of her hospital stays, one of the nurses even charted what a sweet pleasant person she seemed to be. This would have made Mom happy.
Sadly, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s. There are a few medications that help but none that cure. Funding for more research is badly needed.  I hate to sound like a broken record, but if only $1 billion per month went for medical research rather than protecting oil company interests in Iraq (that’s a mere 8 percent or so of the money we send there), how great would the advances in prevention and cure of diseases such as this and cancer be?
Sept. 21 is being recognized by many nations as World Alzheimer’s Day. Many chapters of the Alzheimer’s Organization plan fund raisers they call Memory Walks. This is a worthy cause and I urge anyone able to make a contribution in some way to help raise funds for research. You could help save a life, maybe even your own.

A freelance journalist, Robert “Rocky” Cahill writes regularly for the News & Messenger. His Possum Philosophy column appears in each Saturday edition.