In last year's "Still Alice," Julianne Moore's portrays a woman beset by early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. It's fitting that the academy-award winning film (Moore garnered a Best Actress award for her role) about Alzheimer's features a woman as the central character because the illness disproportionately affects women.
The BeWell@Stanford blog recently featured a Q&A with Stanford neurologist and Alzheimer's researcher Michael Greicius, MD, MPH about Alzheimer's and women. The piece covers the effects of the disease, but I was intrigued to read about the challenges for caregivers of people with the disease (who are also disproportionately women):
Most of the caregivers of people with Alzheimer's Disease are women. Do you have any advice for them in terms of how they can take care of themselves while taking care of a loved one with the disease?
This gets to the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't aspect of AD and women. On the one hand, women are more likely to develop AD; on the other hand, they are also more likely to find themselves as the primary caregiver for someone with AD. It is now well known that caring for someone with AD has a powerful, negative impact on physical and emotional well-being. Particularly as the disease progresses and patients require more care, there is a large physical toll taken when, for example, having to lift patients out of a chair or off the toilet or out of bed. Sleep becomes fractured for the patient. which means it becomes fractured for the caregiver.
Some of the questions also dealt with the fact that despite the recent advances in Alzheimer's research, we still don't completely understand how the disease works or how it can be prevented:
What can we do to reduce our risk for developing the disease?
We do not know of anything that definitely reduces a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's, although there is strong data to suggest that regular aerobic exercise and a heart-smart diet will reduce risk. Head trauma is an important risk factor for AD and another type of dementia, so minimizing exposure to head trauma can also reduce risk of AD. Numerous companies make explicit or implicit claims about their "nutraceutical" or vitamin or "brain-training" software being able to stave off AD. None of these claims are true and most, if not all, of these purveyors are modern-day snake-oil salesmen and saleswomen.
But Greicius is optimistic and pointed out that Stanford recently became an NIH-sponsored Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, which means we can build upon Stanford's past "ground-breaking Alzheimer's research."
Previously: Are iron, and the scavenger cells that eat it, critical links to Alzheimer's?, Alzheimer's forum with Rep. Jackie Speier spurs conversation, activism, Science Friday explores women's heightened risk for Alzheimer's and The toll of Alzheimer's on caretakers
Photo by Maria Morri
