7/25/2009 - Alzheimers in the news

Alzheimer's in the News - 7/25/09

Two summers ago I found out that my father had been classified as the fourth in my extended family to have Alzheimer’s Disease. My step-mother had been using the term “dementia” for some time, but once I heard my uncle use the “A Word” it seemed that everything had changed. Suddenly, I had a context for the changes I had been observing from a far. There was a history, a pattern to relate to, and suddenly the awful road ahead seemed clear. Twelve years of my childhood was spent watching my dad care for his father through his decline through the same disease.

Researchers always seem to be publishing new findings on the causes of Alzheimer’s Disease. One week they report a correlation with a lack of physical activity and the next week there is an article connecting it to a lack of brain exercise. Some make correlations with lower levels of education, unhealthy diets or alcohol consumption. Then there are studies saying that caffeine might slow the onset. The fact that aluminum deposits are consistently found in the brains of the Alzheimer’s afflicted, leads me to look askance at all of those cans I drink from and worry about all of the foil used in past roasts. Basically, everything and nothing has been reported as linked to Alzheimer’s Disease.

In reading all of the latest research, none of these theories has ever had very much resonance with me. My father was always very conscious about exercising and maintaining a healthy diet. He ran in local races and had a passion for oat bran muffins. Though he ate fish oils with gusto, for a large portion of his life he drank up to nine cups of coffee a day. But it turns out that this should have been beneficial! Although he sometimes seemed to be the archetypal absent minded professor, he was doing “all the right things.”

A few weeks ago, I read a BBC news article that linked his type of brain degeneration to elevated nitrate levels. Nitrates are found in fertilizers and insecticides. They are also elevated by the process of grilling or overcooking foods and are found in higher concentrations in processed foods. Ah-ha! Being of Midwestern extraction, processed foods and overcooking are ways of life! “Cooking” in my childhood was more often than not opening some package and adding something like water, oil and scallions. No meal was complete without meat, be it roasted in aluminum or barbequed in the summer. In the summers, farm run off in the water supply raised the nitrate levels in tap water past “acceptable” levels. As a child, I remember articles in the paper stating that the levels of nitrates in the water had now gone past an acceptable level, normally only some fraction of a percentage point, and that the populace should not drink the tap water. At this point we would charge out the store to buy bottled water only to discard this practice when the next newspaper article informed us that levels had returned to a “safe” range. For a shinning moment I thought I had found an explanation.

And then I thought that if all of the other articles had seemed so far apart from my experience, this was just another correlation rather than causation. If this is really a reason, why doesn’t everyone from my area of the country with similar habits have this problem? My easy answer slipped away as quickly as it had come.