When I
was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in June of last year, I assumed there was
nothing I could do to slow its advance. What I knew about the disease was not
much more than what I’d learned from the 1981 movie On Golden Pond, which I viewed when I was in college: the Henry
Fonda character getting lost in his own woods. There was no cure. And, as I
soon learned, the handful of drugs to treat the disease are of limited help.
What I did learn was that certain choices—daily vigorous exercise,
a good diet, good sleep hygiene, and social and intellectual engagement high
among them—could alter the equation of living with the disease. But it was just
last week that I grasped how consequential those choices can be. I came across Rudolph
Tanzi when I was trying to land a panelist—John Zeisel, the author of I’m Still Here: A New Philosophy of
Alzheimer’s—for a forum I was organizing this past spring. A Google search
turned up Tanzi’s appearance on Zeisel’s “Hopeful Aging” local-cable program.
This was Tanzi’s central point: “Ninety-five percent of
the time you are in control of your genes.” This came as a revelation. I’d
assumed the opposite. It’s true that people who inherit the APOE4 gene are at higher
risk of developing Alzheimer’s. But even those of us who have the disease can,
to a significant extent, control our fates. This might sounds like magical
thinking, but the research is embodied in the field of “epigenetics”—the study
of how organisms drive changes in gene expression without altering the genetic
code itself. The term dates back to the 1940s.
And if you have the misfortune of having Alzheimer’s,
there is much compensating you can do, through exercise, modifications to diet,
good sleep hygiene, intellectual and social stimulation. An overarching purpose
in one’s life seems to be theraputic as well. And in contrast to the outdated assumption
that brain cells are finite, Tanzi emphasizes that there are many ways to
generate new brain cells. “Exercise induces them,” he said.…It clears up the
area where they are going to be born.” Daily meditation is recommended. Stress,
on the other hand, is to be avoided as much as possible. For me, the worst
period was 2013, a year in which I made two significant mistakes overseeing
publications, one of them quite costly. Had I been screened for Alzheimer’s at
that time, I could have spared myself a lot of grief and embarrassment—and,
more significantly, corrosive anxiety.
Tanzi elaborated on some of these points in his foreword
to the book Before I Forget: Love, Hope,
Help, and Acceptance in Our Fight Against Alzheimer’s, a colloboration
among B. Smith, the celebrity restaurateur and lifestyle maven who disclosed
she had early-onset Alzheimer’s in June 2014; her husband and manager Dan Gasby;
and the professional writer Michael Shnayerson. Gasby and Shnayerson describe Tanzi
as among the three most prominent figures in Alzheimer’s research. In the
mid-eighties, according to the two writers, Tanzi was among researchers who discovered
the first Alzheimer’s-related gene, APP, amyloid precursor protein.
After I was diagnosed, I anticipated a long day’s journey
into night. But after becoming acquainted with Tanzi’s work, I don’t envision
such a sharp linear descent. I’m not suggesting that this is the equivalent of
a cure. But it makes me feel that in some modest yet significant way, I’m
behind the driver’s wheel, not just trundling toward my execution.
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