Adopting a brain healthy lifestyle, such as eating a Mediterranean-style diet, limiting alcohol and stopping smoking, staying on top of vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, regularly evaluating and treating hearing and vision loss, all while “getting adequate sleep and managing stress can help people slam the breaks on cognitive decline,” he [Isaacson] said.
Literally all of that described my father. He was even a university professor, so he had a lot of schooling.
He also died of frontal lobe dementia. (My wild hypothesis is it was because of what he was inhaling as a child, growing up in London during the Blitz.)
Pretty amazing your father checked all those boxes, and then still developed dementia… My condolences… Just an absolutely horrible disease. Out of curiosity did you ever learn your father’s apoe3 based risk “adjustment” for lack of the correct term? (No pressure to share and certainly no pressure to reveal what that testing came up with) The fact that your father took such good care of himself, exercised his brain, and still developed dementia makes me think there truly must be strong genetic predisposition(s) for it as well. But it’s also scary to think of how many unaccounted-for deaths might actually be ultimately attributable to things like the Blitz and wwii.
Side question- Do/did you ever come to feel confident you could truly narrow it down to one most likely culprit for causing the dementia? I myself lost a parent to alz, and have come to lay the blame on a handful of different possibilities (although truth be told they could all be sort of summarized by something like late stage capitalism or capitalist alienation, or something. I wonder how relatable it is to waffle around endlessly between thoughts that “this is what probably most contributed to it… no this… (months/years later) no this”
It’s rough not being able to point to what truly, certainly went wrong and caused such suffering.
No, we never knew what the cause of the dementia was. It’s all a guess. It also went from so slow we didn’t realize it until after it was too late and he attacked a cop to going immediately downhill from there and dying within 18 months. It was definitely an unusual case. Sorry to hear about the loss of your parent.
Literally all of that described my father. He was even a university professor, so he had a lot of schooling.
He also died of frontal lobe dementia. (My wild hypothesis is it was because of what he was inhaling as a child, growing up in London during the Blitz.)
There’s just no guarantees.
Pretty amazing your father checked all those boxes, and then still developed dementia… My condolences… Just an absolutely horrible disease. Out of curiosity did you ever learn your father’s apoe3 based risk “adjustment” for lack of the correct term? (No pressure to share and certainly no pressure to reveal what that testing came up with) The fact that your father took such good care of himself, exercised his brain, and still developed dementia makes me think there truly must be strong genetic predisposition(s) for it as well. But it’s also scary to think of how many unaccounted-for deaths might actually be ultimately attributable to things like the Blitz and wwii.
Side question- Do/did you ever come to feel confident you could truly narrow it down to one most likely culprit for causing the dementia? I myself lost a parent to alz, and have come to lay the blame on a handful of different possibilities (although truth be told they could all be sort of summarized by something like late stage capitalism or capitalist alienation, or something. I wonder how relatable it is to waffle around endlessly between thoughts that “this is what probably most contributed to it… no this… (months/years later) no this”
It’s rough not being able to point to what truly, certainly went wrong and caused such suffering.
No, we never knew what the cause of the dementia was. It’s all a guess. It also went from so slow we didn’t realize it until after it was too late and he attacked a cop to going immediately downhill from there and dying within 18 months. It was definitely an unusual case. Sorry to hear about the loss of your parent.