Mary had worked as a nursing executive in South Florida for more than three decades when she noticed her first memory lapses. She would forget when reports were due, when staff was scheduled to meet, what her employees had told her in the hallway. To compensate, she worked longer hours.
Eventually, when her extra efforts didn’t work, she went to see Dr. Ranjan Duara, medical director of the Wein Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. After a battery of tests, including an MRI, she received the diagnosis she feared: Alzheimer’s disease.
And she hadn’t even turned 60.
“I was devastated,” she recalls. “I knew what it meant.” She had tended to her father for years after he was diagnosed with AD.
Mary, who asked that her real name not be used, is 61 now and has been retired for about a year. The initial shock has worn off, replaced by a desire and determination to travel and enjoy her family as long as possible.
She’s grateful that early detection of the devastating disease has helped her better plan for the future.
“In a way,” she says, with a rueful laugh, “it’s a blessing to know what you have.”
For people like Mary, relatively new tests — and those currently in the research pipeline — are helpful tools that allow for earlier detection of this disease, a necessary and important step in developing a treatment plan to slow its progress. Traditionally, the only way families got confirmation of Alzheimer’s was after the fact: an autopsy revealed the plaques and tangles in the brain characteristic of the disease. Doctors arrived at a diagnosis after ruling out other explanations for the memory loss and through extensive cognitive testing.
But those telltale plaques and tangles so common in Alzheimer’s can start 10 to 20 years before any symptoms appear. Researchers have long sought a way of detecting those signature markers long before a patient’s memory loss is so severe they can’t function. This is particularly important because as the U.S. population ages, more and more people are expected to be diagnosed with the disease.
More than five million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, and experts predict that as many as 16 million will have it by 2050. Nearly one in three seniors who die each year has some form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s. In fact, Alzheimer’s is the sixth-leading cause of death overall and the fifth for those 65 and older.
Caring for those with the disease is also costly — an estimated $203 billion this year alone. The toll, however, can be measured in more than dollars. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that 15.4 million relatives and friends provided 17.5 billion hours of unpaid care valued at $216 billion in 2012, an equation that only begins to define the demands placed on the families of Alzheimer’s patients.
Though Alzheimer’s is the only top 10 cause of death that has no prevention or cure, doctors say early detection tests can alleviate some of the inevitable stress that accompanies not having a diagnosis, or an incomplete one.
Specialists go through a medical workout to determine what is causing a patient’s memory loss. Initial steps include a variety of tests to determine the extent of that loss and general health, including medical history and figuring out if any family member has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia.
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFQ2roVf2RrYqV4CU27EJYGcH-QAg&url=http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/28/3369446/early-detection-of-alzheimers.html
0 comments:
Post a Comment