http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20130912/alzheimers-may-vary-brain-to-brain

I came across the linked article above and found this Alzheimer’s development quite interesting. The WebMD article cites that “differences in plaque-forming structures in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients may offer clues to why the disease can progress more rapidly or be less severe in some people.”

After implanting proteins into two deceased female Alzheimer’s patients, scientists found that the proteins assembled into different molecular structures. Not only does this help scientists verify two structural varieties of Alzheimer’s, it could also lead to diagnosing and treating afflicted patients at earlier stages. The hope is that this information will give insight into the severity of someone’s condition.

While there is a specific set of symptoms that connects Alzheimer’s patients, the personal nature of memory makes this disorder very unique and tailor-made to the person. If the proteins in the brain can transform into different structures, then it only makes sense that the disease itself materializes in a variety of forms. This news provides some scientific explanation for what many caretakers have observed themselves: that the disease can be as idiosyncratic as the person it takes on as host.

After witnessing dementia in both my grandparents, this revelation is both intriguing and intuitive.

While the body of an Alzheimer’s patient deteriorates, the brain plays host to an orgy of activity. A healthy, adult brain weighs about three pounds, yet it consists of roughly a hundred billion cells, or neurons, which are linked to one another by pathways. The brain serves as the center for all major bodily functions, as well as systems related to emotion, perception, thought, and memory. Everything works together in a harmonized symphony, and yet the brain allows one to act on impulse, extemporaneously, at a moment’s notice. Most of the time, we take for granted how well the brain works. Only when it breaks down do we realize how good we had it in the first place.

Nothing is what it seems in a brain infected with Alzheimer’s. The fact that the same injections of protein could transfigure into different molecular structures only makes sense for no one symptom or test can fully confirm the presence of the disease in the brain. Rather, it is a well-established group of symptoms that when observed in conjunction confirms the condition. An Alzheimer’s patient exhibits impaired memory as well as problems in at least one other area of thinking or functioning, including cognitive symptoms, language problems, changes in personality, problems interacting in social environments, and physical behavior. The patient may experience difficulty in recalling previously known information, learning new information, recognizing spaces or faces, processing language, speaking in coherent sentences, and deciphering meaning. Each patient yields a different combination of results, a fact I can corroborate from personal experience.

While my grandmother lost her ability to utter a word and saw her deceased father in every male figure that approached her bed, my grandfather had difficulty in staying rooted in time and place, often blurring the India of his past with the America of his present. My mind has trouble now separating my grandparents into two individuals; whenever I remember my grandfather, I am transported back to my grandmother’s death and how her passing seeped into the rest of his days, as if my grandfather inherited part of her memory loss through contagion. And even though they reside on opposite ends—my grandfather sitting quietly, transfixed by mundane household objects, and my grandmother, a loose wild child with streaking white hair who wanted to roam freely through the forests of her imagination but instead needed to be tied down—their memories are inextricably intertwined, two hands clenched together to form a fist.

Alzheimer’s has been described as a disease of ‘insidious onset’, for it has no definitive starting point. The disease spreads so slowly, over months, years and even decades, that it can be nearly impossible to detect any harm before considerable damage has already transpired. It creeps in and, like a ghost, replicates itself by casting shadows in the deep recesses of the mind, gradually pulling it down and submerging it under water. Each stage flows into the next without any announcement or noticeable change, for the disease lurks and lingers and nestles in for the long haul.

I imagine that this is a malady that plots in the middle of the night, enacting its grand design so silently that an official diagnosis requires evidence of both plaques and tangles (types of protein), which can only be obtained through physical examination of the brain. In this case, death comes before diagnosis. Rather than living up to its symbol of life, the brain is now a harbinger of death, its two halves folding together to form a coffin. I often wonder how it came to pass that both my grandparents suffered from memory loss. Was there a perfidious strand of the disease in the gene pool that continues to writhe in my own genetic makeup? Is it inevitable that it will be my turn someday? There must be a reason why their brains were so hospitable to conquest. Come to think of it, they always did teach me that guests of the house should be revered like gods.

I always find these scientific developments intriguing because they provide insight into memory and introduce new ways of possibly understanding this constantly shifting, ever-expanding labyrinth.