07 Aug Picturing an end to Alzheimer’s

By Jeff Oloizia, Madison Magazine

In March of this year, my father died at age 79 after a series of prolonged hospital stays. As these things go, it was a fairly straightforward affair: He had long suffered from heart and kidney problems, and for the past decade had been in a slow decline due to dementia. By the end, there was little mystery about what had taken his life.

Yet when the funeral home director, an exceedingly chatty man named Bob, asked us about the specific nature of my father’s dementia, we — my mother, brother and I — fumbled awkwardly. It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought to pinpoint the cause of his decline; it was simply that, by the time his dementia had progressed, a formal diagnosis seemed to offer little help. Besides, brain ailments can be notoriously tricky to diagnose. Without an autopsy, it’s hard to know what’s going on in there.

What we did have, however, were the results of an MRI of my father’s brain, taken several years before his death and excavated from my mother’s files. The first part of the document’s title — MR MEMORY LOSS — made my father sound like the protagonist in a children’s movie about amnesia. Bilateral hippocampal volumes are decreased and are below the 15th percentile on the normative data, it began. I tried to recall my ninth grade biology lessons (what was the hippocampus again?) before giving up and tucking the document back into its folder. Read more…