About Brain Research
Our subject today was a Texan gentleman who writes history books about the west in his spare time after a long life of random jobs. He is funny and engaging and kind, and he has Alzheimer's.
His wife would take every opportunity when he was out of earshot (in the MEG) to tell us about her list of exasperation, the things he can't do anymore. Memory failures: he used to give expository history lectures, then used note cards, and now he writes his lectures out word for word... One of the recent ones, he got to the end of a page, started sort of filling in on an idea from the top of the page, but then forgot where he was and just went through the whole page again. She was telling us about how he used to be a very laid back person, but it's starting that he gets so frustrated he starts yelling.
At the end of the scanning session today, he told us he was kind of hoping to get a report in the mail after his scan. We can't do that; it's research. A radiologist reads every MRI and sends reports out when there's something abnormal (it turns out that Nate has enlarged sinuses), but the reason we're doing the experiment we're doing is that there is NO biological way to diagnose Alzheimer's. When the person dies, you can cut up their brain and look for plaques, but the plaques don't show up on an MRI. When a person is living, diagnoses are by symptoms. The knowledge doesn't exist to diagnose Alzheimer's based on brain activity; that's the whole reason we're doing the study, to find evidence and markers, to catalog information from people with varying stages of disease and in varying stages of "normal" aging, and from this catalog, we hope patterns will emerge, and from the patterns that we hope to find, maybe some day, a diagnosable test will be developed.
It was just frustrating to have to explain that we don't *know,* and we're trying to find out. People want answers. They want medications. Science as a work in progress is hard to hear when it's about your own brain.
His wife would take every opportunity when he was out of earshot (in the MEG) to tell us about her list of exasperation, the things he can't do anymore. Memory failures: he used to give expository history lectures, then used note cards, and now he writes his lectures out word for word... One of the recent ones, he got to the end of a page, started sort of filling in on an idea from the top of the page, but then forgot where he was and just went through the whole page again. She was telling us about how he used to be a very laid back person, but it's starting that he gets so frustrated he starts yelling.
At the end of the scanning session today, he told us he was kind of hoping to get a report in the mail after his scan. We can't do that; it's research. A radiologist reads every MRI and sends reports out when there's something abnormal (it turns out that Nate has enlarged sinuses), but the reason we're doing the experiment we're doing is that there is NO biological way to diagnose Alzheimer's. When the person dies, you can cut up their brain and look for plaques, but the plaques don't show up on an MRI. When a person is living, diagnoses are by symptoms. The knowledge doesn't exist to diagnose Alzheimer's based on brain activity; that's the whole reason we're doing the study, to find evidence and markers, to catalog information from people with varying stages of disease and in varying stages of "normal" aging, and from this catalog, we hope patterns will emerge, and from the patterns that we hope to find, maybe some day, a diagnosable test will be developed.
It was just frustrating to have to explain that we don't *know,* and we're trying to find out. People want answers. They want medications. Science as a work in progress is hard to hear when it's about your own brain.