Alzheimer’s: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Ever thought how would the world be if you lost ability to remember. How would it be if you forgot the first part of your sentence before you could think of the second?
I would take you to a journey from here which will both inform and intrigue you. I’ll show you what’s good and what’s bad.
Alzheimer’s, my friends, is a brain disorder or malfunction, named after a German doctor Alois Alzheimer, who first identified its symptoms and description sometime in 1906.
Here are mentioned a few things about Alzheimer’s:
Alzheimer’s is fatal:
This disease destroys brain cells causing problems with memory , behavior and thinking patterns which in turn affect life in all the possible aspects be it social life , work or personal. It is progressive and leads to death over time. It is one of the 10 biggest causes of deaths all over world.
Alzheimer’s is a type of Dementia which accounts for more than 50 percent of Dementia cases.
There are available medications for the symptoms but there is no cure for the disease. There are multiple ongoing research efforts which are trying to find methods to change the course of disease to improve the lives of millions of people suffering from dementia.
The cognitive symptoms can be treated with the medicines available which prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine which acts as an important chemical messenger for learning and memory.
The behavioral symptoms may vary from patient to patient depending on the way they feel and act. At different stages of illness patients may experience hallucinations, delusions, restlessness and physical or verbal outbursts. There are drugs available to treat physical discomfort but the behavioral symptoms can be treated by changing the environment, or by being more understanding for their mean and ornery behavior.
As we progress in our lives we face occasional memory loss that is being forgetful. But if the severe memory losses and confusions become more frequent then we should get worried that our brain might be failing. Our brain cells communicate with many others to process information, some of them tell our muscles when to move, some help in hearing, thinking and smelling. In Alzheimer’s, as in other types of dementia, increasing number of brain cells die everyday, making our brain too weak to work.

Now for everything you would find pros and cons. We now know what’s bad about Alzheimer’s. I found some people talking about what good does the Alzheimer’s do and what may be termed as ugly about our reaction toward it. Let’s get them one by one.
Good First,
I was reading this article in NYTimes where a lady was talking about the mapping of Alzheimer’s symptoms with the stages of Yoga. She remembered her mother who was suffering from this disease. She talks about how she saw her mother’s brain slowly atrophying and her behavior changing from normal to satisfactory then to the worse. The good that she found out of this disease was that her mother was being more of herself now. She was living “in the moment” because there was no past to remember or no future to worry about.

Alzheimer’s is about living in the present. To exist outside of memory is to occupy the moment wholly. For instance, her mother quit smoking around the time of her diagnosis. As she explained it, when her mother would have the urge to smoke, she would forget to light up before she got her hands on the pack, and so broke a 50-year addiction. It seemed the craving no longer got stuck in her memory circuits, and so easily fell away.
In another instance, ( as in NYTimes ) Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who wrote a book detailing her experience of a stroke that temporarily wiped out the language and other functions of her left brain, describes the right-brain-left-brain dichotomy as dividing thinking about the present — in the right hemisphere — and thinking about the past and future — in the left. The left hemisphere, she says, is responsible for “that ongoing brain chatter.” The right brain, in her rendition of it, collects data through the senses “and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what the present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.”
Now Comes the Ugly part:
Isn’t it time to stop romanticizing tragic conditions like Alzheimer’s and mental illness? I read it somewhere and it made me question why do we have to find good out of a disease? It is quite possible for us to decide whether to enjoy the present and “live in the present” or to worry about the past ad future. A painful degeneration of brain is no way to teach us how live in the present, how to be what we are.
(As in NYTimes)
The cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness may sometimes signal a higher, healthy state, but it can also signal dysfunction and, taken to the extreme, death. We the living need to be bothered and angered and saddened by what we see around us. We need our memories and our projections into the future in order to make progress — scientific and otherwise. From time to time we need to stop and smell the roses, to live in the moment in order to refresh ourselves for the work ahead or to learn to accept those things we must accept, but we ought to thank our lucky stars we can choose to do so, and perhaps we ought to be careful about comparing that choice to the inescapable conditions of those who are ill.
I would leave it up to you decide.

When they will start talking ...!!!

When I was a little kid my great grand ma used to tell me a story of a mouse couple that one season ate too much that they became so fat and could not fit into the mouth of the hole which served as their abode.
Then they decided to go to a man who could help them by taking out some fat from their bodies so that they become slim enough again to enter their home. They requested the cobbler, the carpenter, the king, the queen but no one agreed to help them. I still wonder how would they have told their problem to these people who did not understand their language probably. If you believe my great grand ma they told this all in the language that a man can understand as in “ O dear carpenter ! could you please help us by taking out this extra amount of fat that we have accumulated by eating a lot this season!!! “.
Crazy story for adults !! right ?? But I loved it back then.
If I ask you to imagine a day when this story would be actually possible.. no No no no .. not the too much eating and getting fat part.. but the talking to humans part.

If you believe me I read MARK LEYNER explaining in nytimes how this may come true and you may actually have a talking mouse in your home.
Now to add to your knowledge
“
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have engineered a strain of mice that possesses the human FOXP2 gene, considered by evolutionary biologists to be among several crucial components that endow people with the capacity for speech. Already, the swap of mouse FOXP2 for human FOXP2 has altered the way the mice communicate with one another (their ultrasonic whistles have become slightly lower-pitched).
“
This is not about some sign language or some training to the monkeys which enables them to play with keyboards. This thing is about a rat that’ll be able to sit with you in evening and discuss day to day activities and talk about the political situation in India or just tell old rat stories.

I would be continuing in Mark’s words from here on:
Please visit NYtimes for original article.
After millenniums of maintaining their evolutionary vow of silence, can you imagine — once the genetic gag has come off — how much these mice will have to say? The din of mouse prattle will deafen the planet. And don’t think this is going to stop with just mice. We all know how uncontainable technological innovation is.
If you think I’m just being cynical and churlish about all this, imagine that you’re walking down the street, minding your own business, and a dog looks up and says: “You didn’t complete your b.tech from VIT University, did you? Batch of ’08? You look so familiar.” Do you really want to have to have a conversation with every puggle you encounter? Isn’t it hard enough already to avoid meaningless conversations with people you don’t know?
Sure, there will be the elation of that initial “Doolittle moment.” Ah — the animals will have such wisdom to impart. I imagine that speaking will lead to writing, and writing will lead inexorably to screenplays. And who could resist a remake of “101 Dalmatians” written by actual Dalmatians? But chances are there will be the same ratio of banality to profundity as there is with people. There’ll be a lot of complaining about their minor ailments, endless talk about their own kids, grousing about their mates, etc.
There will also be fundamental philosophical implications — Heidegger’s notion that animals can’t truly experience death because they lack language will have to be completely reassessed, for example. And, perhaps of more immediate consequence, there will be serious economic repercussions, particularly for meat processors. All it will take is one talking cow on “Oprah,” chronicling the horrors of the slaughterhouse, and beef consumption worldwide will cease immediately. (Ditto, some erudite chicken on “The Charlie Rose Show.”)
Now the most nightmarish one— is the prospect of talking insects. You know that time of night when you’re lying in bed and you’re beset by unpleasant thoughts, by all manner of regrets and doubts and self-abasement? I haven’t really accomplished anything I intended to in my life. That sort of stuff? Imagine some mosquito maliciously egging you on. Or imagine that you walk into the kitchen for a midnight snack, turn the light on, and there’s an enormous water bug in the middle of the floor. As you raise your rolled-up magazine for the death blow, the bug looks up at you plaintively and says: “Dude, please. I’ve got a family. Let me go. You’ll never see me again. I swear to God.”
O.K., granted, FOXP2 is only one of the so-called “language genes,” many of which remain to be discovered. But it’s obvious to me that we’re already on the slippery slope to animal eloquence.
As punishment for giving fire to mankind, Prometheus was chained to a cliff, where an eagle gnawed at his liver every day. I can only say to the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology that, for helping give animals the gift of gab, and creating the very real possibility of snidely murmuring mosquitoes and cockroaches able to plead for their lives, you may all deserve an even harsher fate: being chained to a cliff and talked to death by an eagle that just won’t shut up.


Over and Out 