Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

guest column:

Hope springs eternal that cures come soon

Hope plays a large part in dealing with mental illness. As someone with bipolar disorder, hope has kept me believing there’s a brighter future. I hope researchers will find better medications and treatment in my lifetime and that employers will be more empathetic toward people with all kinds of disabilities, and not just because the law forces them to. I hope Medicaid will one day pay psychiatrists what they’re worth per visit so more of them will accept the government insurance on which millions of low-income people rely.

Sadly, until now, there has been very little hope for those diagnosed with dementia, a devastating memory-loss disease that took my grandmother’s life. At first, many everyday things began confusing her. Once I found her crying and lost in her dark garage, which she mistook for the bathroom. Another time she came to visit me in Seattle and got lost while taking a walk. She couldn’t ask for directions to get back to her hotel because she forgot which hotel she was staying in. It took hours until someone was able to help her.

The last time I saw her, she didn’t know who I was. She sat on her couch, looking lost and afraid, calling for the one person she recognized: her full-time caretaker, Zee. Zee was out of sight, in the kitchen, making my grandmother’s lunch. My grandmother kept crying out, “Zee. Where are you, Zee?” Six years after she was diagnosed with dementia, my grandmother died.

As the presidential campaign heats up for November, there’s a glimmer of hope to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, at least according to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. If elected, Clinton promises to invest $16 billion to find a cure by 2025.

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, created the multibillion-dollar proposal for the Clinton campaign. I called him with one question:

Is this realistic?

According to Tanzi, it’s possible, but there’s no guarantee. The funding for Alzheimer’s disease research is so small that few senior researchers nationwide are actually working on finding ways to treat it, he said. Instead, many investigators are switching to other, better-funded fields.

If Clinton’s $2 billion-a-year budget for Alzheimer’s research were to materialize, Tanzi said, senior researchers would at least be lured back to studying the disease, labs would reopen and scientists would put a huge dent in finding a cure.

He compares the future of Alzheimer’s to heart disease. Patients whose hearts are covered in plaque are given preventative treatments, sometimes years in advance, to help them avoid heart attacks. The brains of Alzheimer’s patients likewise have plaque of something called an amyloid beta protein. But there’s no cure for it.

Back in Washington, D.C., another national Alzheimer’s expert researcher, Dr. Trey Sunderland, said he wasn’t holding his breath about Clinton’s proposal. According to Sunderland, “breakthrough” medical discoveries leading directly to cures are rare in medicine, so making specific predictions about finding a cure to anything by a certain date is mostly folly. A lot of difficult scientific discoveries still have to be made.

I have hope that scientists will one day find treatments, if not cures, for all mental health diseases. I am especially inspired knowing how researchers have discovered other life-saving medications for previously fatal diseases, such as AIDS. These days, HIV-positive patients can live out normal lives, something that was unheard of years ago.

Millions of Americans like me have lost loved ones to dementia. Some 5.4 million people live with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s sad. I miss my grandma a lot. I still can envision her before mental illness took over her life, relaxed and sitting on her beloved living room couch, looking out peacefully at the Los Angeles bay in front of her. She’d be proud that I was doing my part to bring attention to her cause.

Kim Palchikoff is studying social work at UNR and writes about mental health. Her Facebook page is NVMindsMatter.

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