Three members of my family have suffered from Alzheimer’s, so the subject is of considerable interest to me. Two of them are now dead, but the third, my mother’s sister, is still living with the disease. Curiously, these people come from both my mother and my father’s side of the family.
Last week I went, for the first time, to visit my aunt in the hospital section of the old people’s home where she now resides. I was unsure what I would find, but in every sense she was still my aunt. The voice was the same, the ways of saying things, the expression on the face, the light in the eyes. Apart from her loss of weight, the biggest difference was that there was little coming out of her mouth that made any sense. Certain catch phrases that my aunt had always used would appear, but randomly.
She would suddenly look at us (another aunt had come with me) with an intent look, as though she expected us to acknowledge what she’d said, and then just as suddenly turn away, distracted by something that was in her mind but not obvious to us. Or she would be caught by something happening in the room, making an incomprehensible query to us about it, and continue to stare intently at it.
She allowed me to hold her hand, but it was impossible to tell whether she knew me or not. However, she made no attempt to stop me holding her hand, or hugging her when we left. She spent a good deal of time talking baby-talk to a large doll she had sitting beside her, in the sort of voice a parent would use to a child.
Conversation was impossible with her, in the normal sense, but my other aunt and I talked to her, and talked with each other. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t unpleasant either.
A week later I saw that Professor Cliff Abraham, a scientist from the University of Otago, in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand, (where I also live) had been awarded the James Cook Research Fellowship as a result of his work on synaptic plasticity.
Synaptic plasticity is a neuroscience term which looks at the ability of the connection, or synapse, between two neurons to change in strength. The degree of plasticity is affected by changes in the amount of neurotransmitter that is released into a synapse, as well as the way in which cells respond to neurotransmitters.
The importance of this subject comes from the supposition that memories are stored in the synapses of the brain. This has important implications in the study of Alzheimer’s disease.
The two-year Fellowship will enable Professor Abraham to continue his research into the brain’s learning and memory mechanisms. He hopes that his research will “improve understanding of the neural mechanisms of memory, both in health and in diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”
In March 2007, he will travel to the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia to learn the technique of patch-clamping of neurons. This is a state-of-the-art technique in neuroscience, and allows scientists to ‘fix’ upon a particular neuron even while an animal (usually a rodent) is in movement, and record what happens to it. Previously, scientists have been unable to work satisfactorily on neurons in animals that are in movement.
This technique, along with other recent developments, such as the identification of an “Alzheimer’s gene,” has great potential for being able to further scientists’ knowledge of what happens to the human mind, and why it can go wrong.
