Читать книгу The Small Guide to Alzheimer's Disease - Gary Small - Страница 7

As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.

—Sir Norman Wisdom

Helen, 56, flipped on the lights in the kitchen, walked straight to the pantry, and stopped dead. What did I come in here for? This kind of thing was happening more and more, and it was starting to worry her. Helen poured herself a glass of water and sat down to drink it. She and her friends often joked about getting older and forgetting things, but it didn’t seem very funny now. She took another sip of water, then suddenly jumped up and ran to her bathroom, where she’d left the tub filling.

Almost everybody experiences memory lapses from time to time, and age-related memory decline is normal. So why are we all so scared by it? Perhaps because our memory defines who we are. Without our memory we have no past, we cannot plan for the future, and we can’t appreciate the present. Another reason memory slips can be so frightening is that they may be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, one of the scariest diseases we know.

Thanks to healthier lifestyles and medical advances, people are living longer than ever before in human history. In 1950, less than 14 million people reached age 80. By 2000, that number grew to 69 million, and by 2050, it is projected that nearly 380 million people will be 80 years or older. The rub is that this greater life expectancy has also escalated the risk for getting Alzheimer’s disease because age is the greatest single risk factor for developing it. In the United States alone, more than 5 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s dementia, which gradually robs them of their mental abilities. That number is expected to triple by 2050, making Alzheimer’s one of the most feared age-related diseases along with cancer.