Dementia

Thursday

Liz Anderson

Farewell, Speccie

So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It may be ‘cost-effective’ to treat the obese before they go on to develop diabetes and other medical problems, but I’m not sure how much sympathy they will get when we already hear about cancer patients having operations delayed and drugs withheld because of stretched NHS budgets. According to the OECD, Hungarians are the most obese people in the EU, followed by Brits. Rather surprisingly, Romanians are the least fat. Surprising, because on a recent holiday to the island of Lefkada, there were a huge number of Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians. And, yes, most of them were huge.

Wednesday

Liz Anderson

How to beat Alzheimer’s

British scientists have identified a set of proteins in the blood which can predict, with 87 per cent accuracy, the start of dementia. Symptoms, apparently, take about ten years to appear after the actual start of Alzheimer’s. Having lived with someone with this horrendous condition, I am certain that I wouldn’t want to take a blood test that would show that in a decade I would develop dementia unless, obviously, I could have it reversed. Ignorance is bliss… But research can’t move forward without volunteers. Between 2002 and 2012, 99.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Why I get my health advice from the Daily Mail

When one is in one’s seventies, as I am, one begins to fear the horror of dementia and to carry out anxious checks on one’s memory to see if the brain is still working. The results in my case are not very encouraging. For example, it took me several days to remember that the film star who canoodled with Leonardo DiCaprio in the stern of the Titanic was called Kate Winslet, although I am an admirer of hers and even once met her. Nor can I remember the words of the songs and poems that I used to know by heart. Am I on my way to becoming a helpless vegetable at the mercy of resentful carers? This is the point at which one turns to the Daily Mail for comfort.

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

How to get old without getting boring

When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one room to another, and so on), books can be wonderfully helpful. At the age of 80, Penelope Lively, the prolific, generally esteemed, novelist, has written an encouraging guidebook for the ageing: For me, reading is the palliative, the daily fix. Old reading, revisiting, but new reading too, lots of it, reading in all directions, plenty of fiction, history and archaeology always, reading to satisfy perennial tastes, reading sideways too — try her, try him, try that.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

The syphilitic sound of Schumann’s violin concerto is part of its genius

Robert Schumann met a wretched end. He died in a lunatic asylum where he thought the nurses were feeding him human faeces. Meanwhile he drove his fellow residents mad by sitting at the piano and bashing out nonsense-music until he had to be dragged away — a grotesque indignity for the creator of the most bewitching quicksilver fantasies in the history of the instrument. After Schumann’s death in 1856, the violinist Joseph Joachim hid away the strange concerto that the composer had written for him in 1853 because it showed evidence of softening of the brain. Clara, Robert’s widow, agreed. That became the conventional wisdom.