Don’t Lose Your Mind
Dr. Michael Colgan
It’s beyond sad to see one of your friends for more than 30 years, a colleague, a brilliant scientist, and a proud and beautiful wife and mother, slowly turn into a shell. Watching her lose her memory was a sight more awful than the foulest cancer. It was wretched hearing the stifled sobs, seeing the tears in her eyes as she realized she had to use her cell phone photos just to remember people, and eventually to remember who she was herself.
Now she no longer remembers how to use a cell phone, and does not know me at all, nor her husband, nor her two children. All the memories, all the years, all the joys of her life and family, are lost to her forever.
She does nothing any more. She watches TV blankly, and cannot even understand the news. Her pealing laughter that would illuminate a room is gone. Her erstwhile smiling mouth is ever set in anguish. The once proud stature bent and trembling, the blazing flame of hair now dank and grey. Despite all the drugs, Alzheimer’s has taken her brain in its deadly grip, a grip that never lets go.
She brought great jewels of laughter,
A million flecks of gold,
And flashing smiles of diamonds,
So dazzling to behold.
But now the house is dismal,
And the wind is heard to grieve,
Where is that lovely lady?
Why did she have to leave?
Don’t let it happen to you. Though I may never have met you, I know exactly where you live. You live in your brain, a mobile house. You can take your brain house anywhere on Earth. But you can never sell it, you can never exchange it, you can never leave it lifelong. So it makes good sense to look after your brain, to nurture and maintain it every day. Yet most people take their brain for granted, and give it less care than they give their teeth.
It may convince you to give your brain more care if you know a few salient facts about memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s has escalated in the US to become the 6th leading cause of death. There is no cure, nor any effective treatment.
In 2011, Barack Obama passed the National Alzheimer’s Protection Act, giving $100 million a year in research grants to find an effective treatment by 2025. Also in 2011, the National Institutes of Health acknowledged that current drugs are ineffective, and changed their long-standing criteria for Alzheimer’s to a focus on prevention. They published voluminous evidence that memory loss, the salient identifying feature of Alzheimer’s, begins to occur in the average American at about age 35.
“Converging evidence from both genetic at-risk cohorts and clinically normal older individuals suggests that the pathophysiological process of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) begins years, if not decades, before the diagnosis of clinical
dementia.” (NIH, 19 April 2011)
The National Institutes of Health also reported that half of all Americans over age 50 will suffer memory loss. Once memory loss progresses to forgetting pots on the stove, the sufferer can no longer live independently, and progresses quickly to total helplessness and 24-hour nursing care, until death.
Since 2011, with modern neuroimaging and cerebrospinal fluid analysis, over 100 controlled studies published in 2012 and 2013, have confirmed the pathological processes that begin in apparently normal people at age 35. Prominent among these is a loss of formation of new neurons (neurogenesis) the normal process that replaces worn-out neurons in the hippocampus, the brain area that is crucial for forming new memories. This loss in one of the earliest events that precipitates a cascade of degeneration in the progression to Alzheimer’s, and very likely the first thing we have to prevent.
The good news is that recent controlled studies also show three interventions that can prevent loss of neurogenesis.
1. Optimum brain nutrition
2. Computerized brain exercises
3. Daily physical exercise with both aerobic and resistance components.
If you can read, understand, and remember this article, it is not too late.
Visit our website for more information on how to Save Your Brain or contact us below.
Health & Nutrition Articles 