A new drug could slow the pace of Alzheimer’s. Three people with experience of the disease explain their story and their hopes
Dementia does not only affect elderly people. There are more than 55 million people living with the condition worldwide. Every year, nearly 10 million more develop this neurodegenerative disease.
These drugs have come eight years too late for my wife, Catriona. She was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2014 when she was just 58. She’s in a home now, unable to look after herself or even speak coherently. By that point, you can’t go out because they can’t go out. My world became as small as hers – just our four walls. When lockdown happened, a part of me almost welcomed it because no one else was able to go out either and I didn’t feel like such an outsider.
These are all educated, intellectual people: one of my uncles spoke three languages. One of them, after he was diagnosed, was terrified. He told me: “I’m scared that I’m not going to be able to recognise anyone.” I could see how much he was suffering in his eyes and he was right: the next week when I went to see him, he was already beginning to not recognise people.
I subscribe to medical journals and talk to people in my family who are doctors, to see if they can give me any new advice. It’s exhausting to be like this. Sometimes I get to the end of the day and I’m completely drained. Loving someone who has Alzheimer’s is torture. The first thing that happens is that they lose any sense of empathy. For me, looking into the eyes of the man I’d shared 50 years with and seeing that he had no empathy for me any more at all was devastating.
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