The Forgetting: Understanding Alzheimer’s: A Biography of a Disease. David Shenk
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Название: The Forgetting: Understanding Alzheimer’s: A Biography of a Disease
Автор: David Shenk
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Спорт, фитнес
isbn: 9780007439669
isbn:
Alois Alzheimer thought it was the tangles. “We have to conelude,” he wrote in 1911, “that the plaques are not the cause of senile dementia but only an accompanying feature.”
Most, however, now said the plaques. In a field where there were so many open questions and possible approaches, the vast majority of researchers in this room and elsewhere were focused tightly on the issue of plaque formation, while relatively few were concerned with tangles and only a handful of others busied themselves with important issues like inflammation, viruses, and possible environmental factors.
The disparity bothered many. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to go into science because I thought it was a very open community,” Ruth Itzhaki, a biologist from the University of Manchester, told me one morning in Taos. “I learned better. It is, in fact, a very cynical community layered with politics and filled with people who just want to follow the herd.” Itzhaki was herself embittered by her struggle to fund research linking the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1) with Alzheimer’s.
Could Alzheimer’s be herpes of the brain? It was not the most prominent theory of the day, but no one could rule it out. Nearly all humans are infected by HSV1 by the time they reach middle age. The virus mostly seems to lie dormant but can become active and create cold sores and other hazards in times of stress. Whether or not HSV1 does any damage depends largely on individual levels of immune response and on genetic makeup.
In her presentation, Itzhaki said she had found evidence of HSV1 presence in the temporal and frontal cortex of the brain, as well as in the hippocampus—three areas closely associated with Alzheimer’s. She posited that the virus might be interacting with a particular gene to set the disease process in motion. If proven true, a massive new global infant immunization project would be in order.
But the crowd in Taos did not seem very interested. Her talk drew little in the way of response. The focus quickly shifted back to plaques.
One evening I got a telephone call from a friend. He was telling me what a tough day he’d had on the job; he’d made several mistakes. “If you have Alzheimer’s, I must have a double dose of it,” he said.
I could feel myself entering a state of rage. “Do you forget simple words, or substitute inappropriate words, making your sentences incomprehensible? Do you cook a meal and not only forget you cooked it, but forget to eat it? Do you put your frying pan in the freezer, or your wallet in the sugar howl, only to find them later and wonder what in the world is happening to you? Do you become lost on your own street? Do you mow your lawn three or four times a day? When you balance your checkbook, do you completely forget what the numbers are and what needs to be done with them? Do you become confused or fearful ten times a day, for no reason? And most of all, do you become irate when someone makes a dumb statement like you just made?”
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