
Slipping Away: Jo Aubin Has  Alzheimer's. He's 38 - benbreen
http://site.macleans.ca/longform/alzheimers/index.html
======
bhrgunatha
A friend of mine suffering from Huntington's disease died last year of
complications. I always think of Alzheimer's similarly to Huntington's,
although I think the prognosis for Alzheimer's has a shorter average life span
from diagnosis.

It's unspeakably distressing seeing people you know degenerate in seemingly
random ways, knowing full well there's literally no chance of improvement,
just temporary pauses in the inevitable.

My friend was quite open when speaking privately in the early days and said
things like "It's OK my mind is still there" when you saw him shaking or
unable to walk properly.

Later though his mental capacity deteriorated and one time when I asked
whether he was aware of his diminishing function he said "No". He understood
the question and for me it was a minor consolation, as heartbreaking as it
seems, for him to be unaware of that. To think that you are aware of your
situation when your body an mind are basically failing would be that much more
horrific. Still it's small consolation. His wife also suffered tremendously,
as strong and stoic as she is. Living with these diseases takes a toll on
everyone around you too.

~~~
MichaelGG
I have seen this happen, too, and it's terrible for everyone involved. Even
when a patient has previously expressed a preference for death versus this
decay, medical personnel and family don't always go along. It's akin to
torture really - the patient is unable to take their own life in such a state,
even though a healthy previous version of them requested it.

It makes me so angry, as instead of good memories of the person, you get this
~decade of someone else essentially destroying the memories.

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petercooper
I have had two grandparents die after having Alzheimer's for long periods of
time. It's odd because it's like watching someone die in slow motion and when
the body does eventually die people often look on it as a relief because the
"person" you knew inside had actually faded away a long time ago. It's like a
song fading to static versus just stopping.

~~~
mgkimsal
"It's like a song fading to static versus just stopping."

Great analogy, yet also one which may eventually be lost to the mists of time.
Much like "disk" icons for "save", younger folks today may have no reference
point for what 'radio static' is, or may certainly not in a few years. Between
internet radio, self tuning radios, spotify/ipods and satellite radio, "radio
static" isn't something I've actively heard myself in many years. Haven't seen
a tube TV picture fade away in to a glowing dot in decades either. :/

~~~
jgrahamc
_The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel._

Is that just a complicated way of saying blue?

~~~
nsxwolf
No, it's black/white/grey and cloudy. Maybe you're thinking of modern
televisions that cut out to a solid color screen, usually blue by default?

~~~
j_s
Agreed, the static was back in the good old CRT days:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=tv+static&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=tv+static&tbm=isch)

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JonoBB
> He visited his family doctor, looking for answers. He had been diagnosed
> with depression and anxiety in university, and now the doctor focused on
> that and prescribed anti-depressants.

This is the fall-back position for lazy doctors. I know because I've been
through it with my wife and a different condition.

We knew at the time that the diagnosis of depression was bullshit, and
immediately sought second (and third) opinions to get to the bottom of what
was going on.

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thomasrossi
My father is a neurologist and he always tells me that until the 90s or so,
Alzheimer was mush rarer than other diseases (although the life expectancy was
not that much shorter than today). There must be some environmental cause to
it and it should be pretty simple to get. We only need some control population
with similar life-span, one has no exposition to tv, one hasn't something
else.. etc

~~~
Madmallard
Let's see: Psychotropics and bacteriocidal antibiotics are both linked with
diseases like alzheimers because they are cytotoxic and can lead to oxidative
stress and mitochondrial damage. They are also being more and more commonly
prescribed.

Air's less and less clean.

God knows how many chemicals are being added to foods, water, construction,
and the environment that are unregulated or poorly studied. I remember seeing
something recently like thousands of chemicals are being used without FDA
approval.

There's also the grandfather theory or whatever. The few generations before us
are some of the first in the industrial revolution, and all of the new
exposures in that are causing DNA changes that are propagating to offspring,
and newer generations are feeling the negative after effects of it.

Yup, we're fucked.

~~~
Brakenshire
If there's an environmental chemical cause, the 2006 REACH legislation in the
EU should provide an interesting comparative study with the US:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Auth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Authorisation_and_Restriction_of_Chemicals)

I don't think I'd agree that air is less and less clean, incidentally. There
have been big improvements in clean technology for cars and other vehicles,
big reductions in the use of coal in developed countries, and so on.

And I doubt other environmental pollutants are significantly higher than they
were in the age before serious environmental legislation (for instance, before
the EPA was created)

~~~
Madmallard
I think you put too much trust in the government's ability to regulate
pollutants and chemical exposures. Governments are like using using an
imperative programming paradigm to address a massively parallel system with
innumerable amounts of state. Googling "unregulated contaminants" brings up
quite a lot of articles.

You might be right about the air cleanliness thing. I recall my father saying
how the air was disgusting where I live now, 40 years ago.

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trentmb
I'm only in my 20's- but reading through this 'early indicator' list [1] has
me somewhat concerned about myself. But I don't know how much of that is it
just being late and me being convinced I have every neurological disorder I
happen to read about.

[1]
[http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_10_signs_of_alzheimers...](http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_10_signs_of_alzheimers.asp)

~~~
carbide
The peanut butter test is interesting. For sufferers of early onset
Alzheimer's, the range at which you can detect a smell is different between
your left and right nostrils. They used Peanut Butter in this test done by the
University of Florida.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_butter_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_butter_test)

~~~
dsego
Now you have me worried.

~~~
tptacek
At long last, the fabled credible Google symptom search result revealing that
your stuffy nose is a smoking gun indicator of a fatal illness!

------
Smirnoff
My grandmom probably had Alzheimer's because she would always forget what my
name was (she'd think she is talking to my little brother) or she would ask
the same questions every 5/10 minutes.

I can see slight similarities with my dad now. He might repeat the same
question within 5 minutes-- this happens when he's really tired.

I remember there was a discussion here about preventative drugs? Anyone one
had experience with them?

~~~
anjc
I could be totally wrong but, I'm pretty sure that that's just a normal aspect
of aging. Every single person I know has experienced _some_ level of cognitive
decline with age. The name thing is especially common, I find. So I wouldn't
go around thinking you have Alzheimers in your family unless you have more
reason to think it.

~~~
feintruled
A function of age and number of children, perhaps. My mother sometimes manages
to cycle through all my siblings' names before she gets to me. One time she
even threw in the dog's name.. a sad reflection on my position in the family
pecking order, perhaps!

~~~
anjc
Agh same here. First my mother's mother did it when I was a child, then my own
mother, and now I'm at it. I've often wondered if there's a learned-behaviour
aspect to it, because I've been anticipating it happening to me since I
noticed my mother doing it.

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coldcode
There is no disease that scares me more than this: to lose control of my mind.
As a programmer besides my hands it's what makes me go. I watched my father
fall apart from Hemochromatosis (iron overload), which is easy to treat these
days, and especially when his once brilliant mind couldn't even pay for things
anymore without being confused. In his case it was due to the iron deposits in
his brain but the effect was similar to Alzheimers. It's hard to see the
person you knew become someone else.

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praptak
Do people usually remember the current date? I can almost never tell it and it
was like this since forever.

~~~
marincounty
I don't, unless I'm working for someone else. I was in Macy's once, and this
angry salesperson was having a bad day, and I just wanted to avoid the dude.
Moved to another counter. Well, Mr. Happy came over to ring me up.

I started to write my check and couldn't remember what date, and even what
year, we were in.

Actually, why rushed, or don't like a person I interacting with; my memory
fails me, or I say things I don't mean. This one car hussler was trying to buy
my car, and doing the "dance"\--it's just worth this much to me--dance, and
I'll half your advertised price. Well he took me by suprised, with the hard
bargaining/bad manners in my garage. I just wanted the guy to go. When he
walked out he noticed a '68 Karman Ghia(no rust-complete--good orig.
condition). He asked how much. I told me $200.00 I told him I mistook his
question later, but to this day I wonder why I said 200.00. I sometimes wonder
if I'm that guy who that's not too savy, and gave always to much over the
years? I remember giving away my inheritance, and look back and regret it. It
seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but I have a feeling this
particular family member manipulated me when I wasen't felling well
psychologically?

Anyway, I think stress can play with judgement, and memory. To those that prey
on weak individuals, or capitalize on someone's misery; you're not a good
person--no amount of denial will take the truth away?

------
tim333
I wonder if in a while the world will move to something like cryonics for
people about to die a slow and unpleasant death. I'm not sure it could be any
worse than the current situation.

