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An article I think is very appropriate for Women's History Month here at Suite101.com
To Help Fight Alzheimer's Disease By J. MADELEINE NASH/MANKATOEven as she sped past her 100th year, Sister Mary projected the energy and enthusiasm of a much younger woman. With the aid of a magnifying glass, she kept abreast of national affairs by reading newspapers and magazines. With the aid of a globe, she prayed for the women and children of the world, one continent at a time. In fact, so savvy did Sister Mary seem, so tuned in to her surroundings, that University of Kentucky epidemiologist David Snowdon began to think of her as a kind of gold standard for successful aging. But when Sister Mary died — in 1995, three months short of her 102nd birthday — an autopsy of her brain revealed a startling secret. Everywhere Snowdon and his colleagues looked, they saw signs of devastation, from microscopic plaques and tangles to gaping holes where millions of brain cells had died. Sister Mary, they realized, had been living with an advanced case of Alzheimer's disease — so advanced, says Snowdon, that it was hard to understand how she could have conducted herself with such clarity and coherence. Gradually Snowdon and his colleagues began to understand that Sister Mary was not unique. Out of a group of 61 deceased nuns whose brains showed clear signs of Alzheimer's disease, a large fraction, 19 in all, seemed to have escaped the confusion and memory loss that make this form of dementia so devastating. The reason? As Snowdon and his team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week, these nuns, unlike their counter-parts whose symptoms were severe, had not suffered from strokes — particularly the small strokes so commonplace in the elderly. Only 57% of the stroke-free nuns developed dementia, compared with 93% of nuns with a history of ministrokes. Other Alzheimer's experts were quick to herald the finding as both provocative and extraordinarily hopeful, for it provides what may be the clearest sign yet that a medically treatable condition can accelerate the decline of Alzheimer's patients and make the difference between independent living and a nursing home. "By preventing strokes," says University of Hawaii neurologist Dr. G. Webster Ross, "we may actually be able to postpone the development of symptoms in people who have Alzheimer's." The link to strokes was the highlight of a flood of Alzheimer's news last week — including
The copyright of the article The Sisters' Gift in Alzheimer's Research is owned by . Permission to republish The Sisters' Gift in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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