"A few years after the onset, the patient gradually retrogrades intellectually, with memory loss, poor thinking, and confusion. They can no longer find their way, they don't recognize people, and they start discarding their belongings. All kinds of restlessness, they chattered, muttered to themselves, sometimes sang, sometimes laughed, they ran around, wasting time, rubbing here, pulling there, getting sloppy... The patient couldn't understand any request and couldn't read it. Can understand any gestures, can't recognize objects or images, can't complete any organized tasks..."
If we go back 20 years, we would call this patient "Alzheimer's disease." The subtle extension seems to imply that this is not a special disease, but the only way for human aging, so that it appears in jokes from time to time - "I forgot where I put my glasses, I have dementia."
Quantitatively, it cannot be ignored. In the United States, someone develops Alzheimer's disease every 65 seconds. Worldwide, a person develops dementia every 3 seconds, and Alzheimer's disease and other dementias are the fifth leading cause of death in the population.
Human understanding of this disease is also deepening. Among the film and television works, there are "Forget Me Not", "Eraser in My Brain" and "Father Trapped in Time" to help us understand Alzheimer's disease and understand the pain of patients. This "Mind Stealing Thief: The Alzheimer's Story" is also a popular science book related to Alzheimer's disease.
The author, Dr. Yu Han, is a professor of science and technology communications at Kansas State University. From a professional perspective and readable language, she systematically combed the tortuous process of experts and scholars' awareness, cognition, and solution of Alzheimer's disease, and told the general public. Understanding and paying attention to Alzheimer's disease, and outlining the trajectory of Alzheimer's disease research in human society.
According to existing research on Alzheimer's disease, the disease is divided into two categories: early-onset and late-onset, based on the age of onset. The former is mainly caused by dominant gene inheritance, and it will develop at the age of 30 to 50. The risk for the latter is age: the older you are, the more likely you are to get the disease.
In 1900, the average American had a life expectancy of 47 years. A hundred years ago, most of the people died of old age or other diseases before they entered a high-risk age. Alzheimer's disease was a rare disease at that time.
However, over the past century, the life expectancy of the entire population has generally increased. The average American's life expectancy rose to 68 years in 2010 and 79 years in 2020, significantly increasing the risk of Alzheimer's disease. In 2019, 5.8 million Americans were living with Alzheimer's disease. The number of Alzheimer's patients in China is estimated to exceed 10 million. Considering the growing trend of the elderly population, this number will continue to grow in the times we live in.
ALS and Alzheimer's disease are like two ends of a mirror. In the long farewell, one is that the spirit is burning and the body is gradually falling asleep, and the other is that the body is still functioning and the spirit is gone. For the client suffering from Alzheimer's disease and the relatives of the client, it is a period of pain ranging from a few months to several years, which distorts and cuts off the patient's personality.
Each of us may face this judgment. That feeling is like what Wang Xiaobo wrote: "In the evening, you sit under the eaves and watch the sky slowly darken, feeling lonely and desolate in your heart, feeling that your life has been deprived."
The cause of Alzheimer's disease At present, there is no clear conclusion, there are many hypotheses, the mainstream paradigm is the "β-amyloid hypothesis", this theory believes that Aβ aggregates outside the cell to form fibrillar aggregates-β-amyloid oligomers, and then form β-amyloid oligomers. Amyloid plaques lead to local tissue inflammation and neuronal apoptosis.
However, even this mainstream interpretation path is far from infallible. In the top news of "Science" magazine on July 21, a report pointed out that a foundational work related to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease was suspected of academic misconduct. Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Matthew Schrag believes that there may be scientific misconduct in related research around Aβ*56 since 2006.
In fact, since the Aβ hypothesis was formally proposed in the 1990s, this hypothesis has been questioned by the research community. What we currently know is that there are many research directions within the Aβ hypothesis, and the research direction suspected of fraud is only one of them, and it is not the mainstream (the mainstream is for Aβ*42 instead of 56). Despite its many flaws and inconsistencies, the Aβ hypothesis remains the most acceptable of the many hypotheses about Alzheimer's disease in terms of comprehensive explanatory power.
However, this also led to the main flow of personnel and funds to the research direction of the Aβ hypothesis, to a certain extent, the researchers in this research direction became a kind of "interest group", and the research of Alzheimer's disease was therefore infected with politics. tinted colors.
This book has a lot of ink in it. For example, in order to get more funding for the institute, the director chose Alzheimer's disease to attract the interest of political forces. In order to increase the visibility of Alzheimer's disease and to apply for research funding, scientific researchers guide civil forces to establish relevant associations and organizations (such as Alzheimer's Disease Association). The institute even proactively contacted newspapers and magazines to implement public relations projects, such as making up stories about patients' families in newspapers to arouse emotional resonance. Alzheimer's disease has received unprecedented attention, with money flowing to charities associated with it.
The process of Alzheimer's disease drug development is also aimed at attracting funds. Some people choose to cover up failed experiments and publicize successful experiments in isolation, or repeatedly manipulate and divide the data of failed experiments to deceive themselves. conclusion that the drug is effective. This is not helpful for the treatment of the disease, and even worsens the patient's condition and develops complications.
Relevant government departments, relevant social groups, pharmaceutical companies, scientific researchers, peer scholars, and many actors constitute the actor network of Alzheimer's disease drug research and development, and the key actor is still the government. The actions of each subject affect the whole body, and the government also has different tendencies in different research directions.
The author is indifferent, stating one fact after another—failure, failure, hope, failure as always. Global surveys, three rounds of clinical trials, large pharmaceutical companies endured huge losses, and small companies went bankrupt directly.
On the individual side, regarding the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, we may prioritize searches for "how to take care of elders" and "what activities for elders to participate in can reduce their risk of Alzheimer's disease". However, as of the time of Professor Yu Han's writing, there is no Alzheimer's disease preventive vaccine or Alzheimer's disease specific drug that is really effective in preventing and curbing the disease.
Only in the last chapter of the book, the professor gave advice on prevention and coping plans - living a fulfilling life.
What you do is not very important, what is important is to do it: improve the expression of sentences, improve the density of ideas in writing, store more knowledge in the brain, participate in social activities, insist on doing aerobic exercise...
None of the above is clinical. Test the support to test its effect. But understanding them makes our lives more fulfilling, enriching, and informs us about living a better life.
Being forced to forget is terrible, it means that the world will gradually blur and dim in front of your eyes, and it is also torture for the person you love around you. If one day the person you love forgets you, what will you do? Perhaps most importantly, give companionship and let each other know that we are not alone.
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