Alzheimer's Today
Once considered an elderly affliction, it is now claiming younger victims
O'FALLON,MO.–The Post-it note on Charley Schneider's shirt says to call his wife, Barb, at work. In his pocket, Schneider has a pad with other instructions, such as remembering to meet some friends outside town who are coming to visit for a few days and guide them back to his house. Earlier in the morning, Schneider found other reminders from Barb on the dining room table: "take out the garbage" and "take your pills."
Schneider is a former cop, fireman, and part-time private investigator. He needs these missives to get him through each and every day, because he's losing his mind. Schneider has Alzheimer's disease, and he's only 55 years old. "I think we keep the Post-it people in business," he says, settling back into an easy chair in his two-bedroom apartment about 45 minutes west of St. Louis. He and Barb moved there at the end of 2005, two years after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. The couple hoped that selling their large house would simplify Schneider's life, making it easier for him to find things in a smaller space. "We can still talk and drive and even work in some jobs," Schneider says, "but we need reminders to help us get by."
By "we," Schneider means the several hundred thousand people–perhaps as many as 640,000–under the age of 65 who have dementia, the vicious thief of minds that steals memories, personality, relationships, language, and ultimately the ability to function as a human being. Alzheimer's is the most common form of the disease. Recently, thanks to better diagnostic tests that lead to earlier detection, the medical community has started to recognize that dementia is an equal-opportunity destroyer. "In the last five years, more younger people have been showing up at support group meetings and in doctors' offices, asking for help, and we realized this is something we need to start taking seriously," says neurologist Ronald Petersen, an Alzheimer's and memory disorders specialist at the Mayo Clinic. It afflicts people in their 50s, their 40s, and even in their 30s. "Alzheimer's is not just a disease that hits 80-year-olds in nursing homes," says Dallas Anderson, a specialist in the epidemiology of dementia at the National Institute on Aging.
"The walking dead"? The disease may be the same for all ages, but everything about having it is different for its younger victims. Unlike older patients who are typically retired, confined to an assisted-living facility, and whose children are grown, young sufferers are in their prime: workers, mothers and fathers, and caretakers who have duties and responsibilities, car payments, and mortgages. They suffer with memory troubles for years without an accurate diagnosis, since many general physicians still regard dementia as a disease of the aged and infirm. "Nationally," says Pierre Tariot, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix, "there's not enough help for younger people with dementia–or older people." There is some basic research, though. Scientists studying the genes of younger patients have found three mutations that seem to make some susceptible to the disease. But these genes don't explain most of the cases, says John Morris, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The research is important, he says, "but because of where they are in life, they also need a lot more social support."
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