Health Report: Losing our minds?
Harbouring an Alzheimer's time bomb that could
affect millions of us. Nicola Gill investigates...
Milly Harper thought nothing of it when her property developer
husband Mark mislaid the master keys to the house he was renovating
for the third time in a week. When
Mark also seemed prone to
bouts of irritability over the next few years she put it down to
too much work and not enough play. But alarm bells finally began to
ring four years after the forgotten keys incident, in the run up to
Mark's 50th birthday. "For several weeks beforehand
I'd mention his birthday and suggest ideas of how to
celebrate," explains Milly. "I was throwing him off the
scent because I'd arranged a surprise party. But whenever I
mentioned it, he seemed to have no idea his birthday was coming up.
Then came the actual party. As we circulated around the room, I
realised he didn't recognise a few of the guests until we'd
talked to them for a while; then the penny dropped. But these were
people we'd known for years. It was that night I first had the
dreadful feeling something was seriously wrong."
Over the next year Mark frequently had uncharacteristic outbursts of rage and often seemed confused by the simplest tasks. By his following birthday he'd been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and Milly has had to endure the heartache of seeing Mark decline from a vibrant man to a hollow shell of himself.
"There are times when he clearly has no idea who I or the children are," she says. "And we have to cope knowing it is only a matter of time before he will never recognise us again. The business has gone by the wayside as I can't care for him and run it alone and we have had to sell our home. In many ways it's the cruellest illness you can get, yet the attention that it receives from the media and society is minimal."
Alzheimer's low profile, and the terrible toll it takes on sufferers, was raised in 2007 when renowned author Terry Pratchett revealed he had been diagnosed at 59 with the rare posterial cortical atrophy form of the disease. From his own pocket, he donated £1 million to Alzheimer's research and said at the time, "This damn disease is not going to go away, it's only going to get worse. There is a war being fought, and maybe it's time to go and join the troops." The author has difficulty with spelling and reading and it now takes him several minutes to perform simple functions such as knotting a tie.
But while cases of early-onset Alzheimer's in well-known public figures may grab the headlines, the reality of the disease will soon be hitting many of us much closer to home. A Department of Health report in 2008 forecast that, as the UK population ages, the number of patients diagnosed with it will soar by 70 per cent in the next 20 years - by which time 1.2 million of us will have the illness. But unlike cancer or heart disease, which can often be successfully controlled or even cured, there is no treatment for Alzheimer's to prolong a patient's lifespan or even significantly reduce their symptoms. And it's not helped by the fact that there's only a small amount of research going on that could bring breakthroughs.
Alzheimer's, the commonest form of dementia, was named after
German physician Alois Alzheimer who was presented in 1901 with a
51-year-old woman with memory problems. She had difficulty speaking
and understanding what was said to her and, within a few years, was
bedridden, before dying five years after he first met her. With the
family's permission he examined her brain after death and found
dramatic shrinkage, especially of the cortex, which controls the
memory, thinking, judgement and speech.
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