09 Jun Progress on Alzheimer’s Disease

According to UW geriatrician Nathaniel Chin ’06, MD’10, “We are on a trajectory for prevention.”

By George Spencer, OnWisconsin

During a holiday visit home in 2012, Nathaniel Chin ’06, MD’10 sat down with his mother for a talk — an event that changed his life. At the time, Chin was doing his internal medicine residency in California. He planned to specialize in infectious diseases.

For nearly 40 years, his father, Moe, a first-generation American, had been a doctor in Watertown, Wisconsin. Working as many as 100 hours a week, he treated everyone in town from birth to death. Growing up, Nate often watched his father as he left home late at night toting his black leather physician’s satchel. The next morning, as he went to school, he would greet his father coming back.

On that fateful day in 2012, Chin learned that Moe probably had Alzheimer’s disease. His father couldn’t remember what he was watching on television or recognize their car in parking lots. “I can close my eyes, be back in that room, and remember the tears on my face,” says Chin, who abruptly changed his career plans. He would now care for Alzheimer’s patients.

After finishing his residency, Chin returned to University Hospital and became a memory care geriatrician. In his spare time, he made the hour-long trip to Watertown to help his mother. He fed, bathed, and cleaned Moe, who passed away at home at age 66, six years after his diagnosis.

Today Chin is an assistant professor in the UW Department of Medicine and the medical director of the UW’s widely respected Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), one of the nation’s 33 federally funded research hubs studying the condition. Founded in 2009, it supports 42 scientists and dozens of investigators seeking to improve early Alzheimer’s detection and to arrest the disease’s onset and progression. Read more …