The Forgetting: Understanding Alzheimer’s: A Biography of a Disease

DAVID SHENK

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Flamingo 2003

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

First published in the US by Doubleday 2001

Copyright © David Shenk 2001

David Shenk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Several of the names and identifying characteristics

of the individuals depicted in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

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Source ISBN: 9780006532088

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007439669

Version: 2016-09-09

DEDICATION

For Lucy

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

PART I EARLY STAGE

1. I Have Lost Myself

2. Bothered

3. The God Who Forgot and the Man Who Could Not

4. The Race

5. Irrespective of Age

6. A Most Loving Brother

PART II MIDDLE STAGE

7. Fumbling for the Name of My Wife

8. Back to Birth

9. National Institute of Alzheimer’s

10. Ten Thousand Feet, at Ten O’Clock at Night

11. A World of Struldbruggs

12. Humanize the Mouse

13. We Hope to Radio Back to Earth Images of Beauty Never Seen

PART III END STAGE

14. Breakthrough?

15. One Thousand Subtractions

16. Things to Avoid

17. The Mice Are Smarter

Epilogue

Resources for Patients and Families

Sources

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

About the Publisher

LEAR: Does any here know me? This is not Lear.

Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, his discernings

Are lethargied—Ha! Waking? ’Tis not so.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

FOOL: Lear’s shadow.

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

PROLOGUE

“When I was younger,” Mark Twain quipped near the end of his life, “I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.”

At age seventy-two, Twain’s memory and wit were intact. But behind his remark lay a grim recollection of another celebrated writer’s true decline. In December 1877, Twain had come to Boston at the invitation of William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, to satirize a group of Brahmin intellectuals. Among Twain’s targets that night was the father of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It was after midnight when Twain finally took to the floor at the Hotel Brunswick to spin his yarn. He told the venerable crowd about a lonely miner who had been victimized by three tramps claiming to be famous American writers. The literary outlaws stormed into the miner’s cabin, ate his beans and bacon, guzzled his whiskey, and stole his only pair of boots. They played cards and fought bitterly. One of the tramps called himself Emerson.

The point of the skit was to poke some harmless fun at Emerson by corrupting some of his noble expressions. As they played cards at the climax of the story, the Emerson hobo spat out contorted fragments of his poem “Brahma.” A mystical paean to immortality, the original included these stanzas:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Twain twisted the verse into drunken poker banter:

I am the doubter and the doubt—

They reckon ill who leave me out,

They know not well the subtle ways I keep,

I pass and deal again.

An elegant master of spoof, Twain was revered around the world as the funniest living man. But on this important night, his material bombed. From the start. Twain drew only silence and quizzical looks, most prominently from Emerson himself. At the finish, Twain later recalled, there “fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch.” He was humiliated. Shortly afterward, he sent a letter of apology to Emerson.

Only then did Twain learn of the hidden backdrop to his performance: Emerson had been present only in body, not in mind. Emerson’s dead silence and flat affect, Twain discovered, was a function of neither offense nor boredom. As his daughter Ellen wrote to Twain in reply, it was simply that he had not understood a word of what Twain was saying.

At age seventy-four, this was no longer the Ralph Waldo Emerson who had written “Self-Reliance” and Nature; who had said, “Insist on yourself; never imitate”; who had mentored Henry David Thoreau; the Emerson of whom James Russell Lowell had said, “When one meets him the Fall of Adam seems a false report.”

This was now a very different man, a waning crescent, caught in the middle stages of a slow, progressive memory disorder that had ravaged his concentration and short-term memory and so dulled his perceptions that he was no longer able to understand what he read or follow a conversation.

“To my father,” Ellen wrote to Twain of the performance, “it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely.”

One of the great minds in Western civilization was wasting away inside a still vigorous body, and there was nothing that anyone could hope to do about it.

Taos, New Mexico: March 1999

They came from Melbourne, Mannheim, St. Louis, London, and Kalamazoo; from Lexington, Stockholm, Dallas, Glasgow, Toronto, and Kuopio. From Tokyo, Zurich, and Palo Alto.

Some took two flights, others three or four, followed by a winding three-hour van ride from the floodplains of Albuquerque, up through the high desert terrain of Los Alamos, past the Sandia mountains, past the Jemez volcanic range, past the Camel Rock, Cities of Gold, and OK casinos, up near the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

More than two hundred molecular biologists gathered in the small but sprawling city of Taos, amidst the adobe homes and green-chile quesadillas, to share data and hypotheses. This high-altitude, remote desert seemed like a strange place to fight a threatening disease. But specialists at the biannual conference “Molecular Mechanisms in Alzheimer’s Disease” needed a refuge from their routine obligations.

For four and a half days they met in Bataan Hall, an old ballroom converted into a civic center. The room had once been used as a shipping-off point for soldiers in World War II, and later named in memory of those same soldiers’ wretched ordeal in the infamous Bataan Death March. Some five hundred prisoners died each day on that trek, about the same number now dying each day in the U.S. from Alzheimer’s disease.

At 8:00 P.M. on the first evening, Stanley Prusiner, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a 1997 recipient of the Nobel Prize in medicine, rose to give the keynote address. “I can’t compete with Monica,” he began with a shrug. “But I think we all know that we wouldn’t learn anything new.”

Barbara Walters’ much-anticipated TV interview with Monica Lewinsky was starting to air on ABC at that very moment, which further fueled the sense of isolation. The local support staff had just raced home to their televisions to catch the well-lighted promotion for the million-dollar book about the sordid affair with the needy President.

No TVs here. The scientists in this large, windowless chamber were distracted by something else: Alzheimer’s disease was about to become an epidemic. Known as senility for thousands of years, Alzheimer’s had only in the past few decades become a major health problem. Five million Americans and perhaps 15 million people worldwide now had the incurable disease, and those numbers would soon look attractive. Beginning in 2011, the first of the baby boomers would turn sixty-five and start to unravel in significant numbers. By 2050, about 15 million people in the U.S. alone would have Alzheimer’s, at an annual cost of as much as $700 billion.

Other industrialized nations faced the same trends. In Japan, one in three would be elderly by 2050. In Canada, the number of elderly would increase by 50 percent while the working-age population increased by just 2 percent. In Britain and elsewhere in industrialized Europe, eighty-five-and-over would continue to be the fastest growing segment of the population. “We have to solve this problem, or it’s going to overwhelm us,” said Zaven Khachaturian, former director of the Alzheimer’s Research Office at the National Institutes of Health. Alzheimer’s had already become a costly and miserable fixture in society. Unless something was done to stop the disease, it would soon become one of the defining characteristics of civilization, one of the cornerstones of the human experience.

They were here to solve this problem.

PART I

EARLY STAGE

The other day I was all confused in the street for a split second. I had to ask somebody where I was, and I realized the magnitude of this disease. I realized that this is a whole structure in which a window falls out, and then suddenly before you know it, the whole façade breaks apart.

This is the worst thing that can happen to a thinking person. You can feel yourself, your whole inside and outside, break down..

—M.

New York, New York

Chapter 1 I HAVE LOST MYSELF

A healthy, mature human brain is roughly the size and shape of two adult fists, closed and pressed together at the knuckles. Weighing three pounds, it consists mainly of about a hundred billion nerve cells—neurons—linked to one another in about one hundred trillion separate pathways. It is by far the most complicated system known to exist in nature or civilization, a control center for the coordination of breathing, swallowing, pressure, pain, fear, arousal, sensory perception, muscular movement, abstract thought, identity, mood, and a varied suite of memories in a symphony that is partly predetermined and partly adaptable on the fly. The brain is so ridiculously complex, in fact, that in considering it in any depth one can only reasonably wonder why it works so well so much of the time.

Mostly, we don’t think about it at all. We simply take this nearly silent, ludicrously powerful electrochemical engine for granted. We feed it, try not to smash it too hard against walls or windshields, and let it work its magic for us.

Only when it begins to fail in some way, only then are we surprised, devastated, and in awe.

On November 25, 1901, a fifty-one-year-old woman with no personal or family history of mental illness was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, by her husband, who could no longer ignore or hide quirks and lapses that had overtaken her in recent months. First there were unexplainable bursts of anger, and then a strange series of memory problems. She became increasingly unable to locate things in her own home and began to make surprising mistakes in the kitchen. By the time she arrived at Städtische Irrenanstalt, the Frankfurt Hospital for the Mentally Ill and Epileptics, her condition was as severe as it was curious. The attending doctor, senior physician Alois Alzheimer, began the new file with these notes in the old German Sütterlin script.

She sits on the bed with a helpless expression.

“What is your name?”

Auguste.

“Last name?”

Auguste.

“What is your husband’s name?”

Auguste, I think.

“How long have you been here?”

(She seems to be trying to remember.)

Three weeks.

It was her second day in the hospital. Dr. Alzheimer, a thirty-seven-year-old neuropathologist and clinician from the small Bavarian village of Markbreit-am-Main, observed in his new patient a remarkable cluster of symptoms: severe disorientation, reduced comprehension, aphasia (language impairment), paranoia, hallucinations, and a short-term memory so incapacitated that when he spoke her full-name, Frau Auguste D——, and asked her to write it down, the patient got only as far as “Frau” before needing the doctor to repeat the rest.

He spoke her name again. She wrote “Augu” and again stopped.

When Alzheimer prompted her a third time, she was able to write her entire first name and the initial “D” before finally giving up, telling the doctor, “I have lost myself.”

Her condition did not improve. It became apparent that there was nothing that anyone at this or any other hospital could do for Frau D. except to insure her safety and try to keep her as clean and comfortable as possible. Over the next four and a half years, she became increasingly disoriented, delusional, and incoherent. She was often hostile.

“Her gestures showed a complete helplessness,” Alzheimer later noted in a published report. “She was disoriented as to time and place. From time to time she would state that she did not understand anything, that she felt confused and totally lost. Sometimes she considered the coming of the doctor as an official visit and apologized for not having finished her work, but other times she would start to yell out of the fear that the doctor wanted to operate on her [or] damage her woman’s honor. From time to time she was completely delirious, dragging her blankets and sheets to and fro, calling for her husband and daughter, and seeming to have auditory hallucinations. Often she would scream for hours and hours in a horrible voice.”

By November 1904, three and a half years into her illness, Auguste D. was bedridden, incontinent, and largely immobile. Occasionally, she busied herself with her bed clothes. Notes from October 1905 indicate that she had become permanently curled up in a fetal position, with her knees drawn up to her chest, muttering but unable to speak, and requiring assistance to be fed.

What was this strange disease that would take an otherwise healthy middle-aged woman and slowly—very slowly, as measured against most disease models—peel away, layer by layer, her ability to remember, to communicate her thoughts and finally to understand the world around her? What most struck Alzheimer, an experienced diagnostician, was that this condition could not fit neatly into any of the standard psychiatric boxes. The symptoms of Auguste D. did not present themselves as a case of acute delirium or the consequence of a stroke; both would have come on more suddenly. Nor was this the general paresis—mood changes, hyperactive reflexes, hallucinations—that can set in during the late stages of syphilis. She was clearly not a victim of dementia praecox (what we now call schizophrenia), or Parkinson’s palsy, or Friedreich’s ataxia, or Huntington’s disease, or Korsakoff’s syndrome, or any of the other well-recognized neurological disorders of the day, disorders that Alzheimer routinely treated in his ward. One of the fundamental elements of diagnostic medicine has always been the exercise of exclusion, to systematically rule out whatever can be ruled out and then see what possibilities are left standing. But Alzheimer had nothing left.

What the fifty-one-year-old Auguste D.’s condition did strongly evoke was a well-known ailment among the elderly: a sharp unraveling of memory and mind that had, for more than five thousand years, been accepted by doctors and philosophers as a routine consequence of aging.

History is stacked with colorful, poignant accounts of the elderly behaving in strange ways before they die, losing connection with their memories and the world around them, making rash decisions, acting with the impetuousness and irresponsibility of children. Plato insisted that those suffering from “the influence of extreme old age” should be excused from the commission of the crimes of sacrilege, treachery, and treason. Cicero lamented the folly of “frivolous” old men. Homer, Aristotle, Maimonides, Chaucer, Thackeray, Boswell, Pope, and Swift all wrote of a distressing feebleness of mind that infected those of advancing years.

“Old age,” wrote Roger Bacon, “is the home of forgetfulness.”

Known as morosis in Greek, oblivio and dementia in Latin, dotage in Middle English, démence in French, and fatuity in eighteenth-century English, the condition was definitively termed senile dementia in 1838 by the French psychiatrist Jean Étienne Esquirol. In a depiction any doctor or caregiver would recognize today. Esquirol wrote: “Senile dementia is established slowly. It commences with enfeeblement of memory, particularly the memory of recent impressions.”

But that was senile dementia. What was this? Alois Alzheimer wanted to know. Why did a fifty-one-year-old appear to be going senile? How could Auguste D. be suffering from the influence of extreme old age?

We are the sum of our memories. Everything we know, everything we perceive, every movement we make is shaped by them. “The truth is,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “that, in the process by which the human being, in thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining … inside that surrounding misty cloud a bright gleaming beam of light arises, only then, through the power of using the past for living and making history out of what has happened, does a person first become a person.”

The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl made much the same point in Man’s Search for Meaning, his memoir of experiences as a concentration camp inmate. Frankl recalled trying to lift the spirits of his fellow camp inmates on an especially awful day in Dachau: “I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. [I quoted] a poet … who had written. Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

Emerson was also fascinated by memory—how it worked, why it failed, the ways it shaped human consciousness. Memory, he offered about a decade or so before his own troubles first appeared, is “the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are embedded … without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession.” While he constructed an elaborate external memory system in topical notebooks, filling thousands of pages of facts and observations that were intricately cross-referenced and indexed, Emerson was also known for his own keen internal memory. He could recite by heart all of Milton’s “Lycidas” and much of Wordsworth, and made it a regular practice to recite poetry to his children on their walks. His journal entries depict an enchantment with the memory feats of others.

He kept a list:

• Frederic the Great knew every bottle in his cellar.

• Magliabecchi wrote off his book from memory.

• Seneca could say 2,000 words in one hearing.

• L. Scipio knew the name of every man in Rome.

• Judge Parsons knew all his dockets next year.

• Themistocles knew the names of all the Athenians.

“We estimate a man by how much he remembers,” Emerson wrote.

Ronald Reagan was never particularly admired for his memory. But in the late 1980s and early ’90s, he slowly began to lose his grasp on ordinary function. In 1992, three years after leaving the White House, Reagan’s forgetting became impossible to ignore. He was eighty-one.

Both his mother and older brother had experienced senility, and he had demonstrated a mild forgetfulness in the late years of his presidency. Like many people who eventually suffer from the disease, Reagan may have had an inkling for some time of what was to come. In his stable of disarming jokes were several about memory troubles afflicting the elderly. He shared one at a 1985 dinner honoring Senator Russell Long.

An elderly couple was getting ready for bed one night, Reagan told the crowd. The wife turned to her husband and said, “I’m just so hungry for ice cream and there isn’t any in the house.”

“I’ll get you some,” her husband offered.

“You’re a dear,” she said. “Vanilla with chocolate sauce. Write it down—you’ll forget.”

“I won’t forget,” he said.

“With whipped cream on top.”

“Vanilla with chocolate sauce and whipped cream on top,” he repeated.

“And a cherry,” she said.

“And a cherry on top.”

“Please write it down,” she said. “I know you’ll forget.”

“I won’t forget,” he insisted. “Vanilla with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.”

The husband went off and returned after a while with a paper bag, which he handed to his wife in bed. She opened up the bag, and pulled out a ham sandwich.

“I told you to write it down,” she said. “You forgot the mustard.”

It seems clear enough that Reagan was increasingly bothered by personal memory lapses. In a regular White House checkup late in his second term, the President began by joking to his doctor, “I have three things that I want to tell you today. The first is that I seem to be having a little problem with my memory. I cannot remember the other two.”

Did Reagan have Alzheimer’s disease in office? Yes and no. Without a doubt, he was on his way to getting the disease, which develops over many years. But it is equally clear that there was not yet nearly enough decline in function to support even a tentative diagnosis. Reagan’s mind was well within the realm of normal functioning. Even if his doctors had been looking intently for Alzheimer’s, it is still likely that they would not have been able to detect the disease-in-progress. A slight deterioration of memory is so common among the elderly that even today it is considered to be a natural (if unwelcome) consequence of aging. About a third to a half of all human beings experience some mild decline in memory as they get older, taking longer to learn directions, for example, or having some difficulty recalling names or numbers.