About Brad Perry

Brad on his 70th birthday in 2008

There are inevitably many myths surrounding Alzheimer's Disease, including the question of prevention.  People often think you can prevent the disease, or at least reduce your risk of getting it, by keeping mentally and physically active.

Brad in May 2012 with his grandson

My dad, Brad Perry, is proof that if mental and physical fitness reduces your risk, it certainly doesn't prevent the disease.  He has kept fit all the time I've known him, mostly by swimming (he used to run, until a thief broke into his apartment in NYC and stole his running shoes).  At the community where my parents now live, he won the "Olympics" swimming competition last year - he has always had a strong butterfly.

He has always kept mentally active as well.  He has a PhD in Physics from Columbia, and did post-doctoral work at Berkeley and Yale.  Even later, when he switched fields to Economics, he stayed abreast of current thinking in physics, reading Scientific American and Science News, and of course more recently keeping up via the internet.  He was always keen to study and learn new things.

As you can see from the 2008 photograph, he aged relatively well, up until Alzheimer's Disease took over.  By 2011, he was emaciated, his skin was in very poor condition, and all the brightness had gone out of his expression - you can see him in a typical pose in the 2012 photograph.  One difficulty with this disease is that you can no longer care for your body, and even with the help of my mother and various carers, his body has shown the effects of his neglect of it.  Some of the drugs he was prescribed by well-meaning doctors also made it harder for him to balance, and upset his digestion, which hastened his body's deterioration.

However, one must have some compassion for the doctors.  There is no drug that will prevent or cure Alzheimer's Disease.  The few drugs that are approved merely slow its progress very slightly, but they can't even do this indefinitely - the disease will inexorably progress, and will kill the patient if something else doesn't get there first.  Presumably many doctors will reach for any drug that they think might do some little bit of good for some of the symptoms, when faced with a bright, engaging patient who is fading fast.

Fortunately, my dad has always been fairly laid back, so the fact that he doesn't know most of the people around him (including his children and grandchildren) doesn't seem to worry him.  My brother and I switched to calling him "Brad" rather than "Dad" about a year ago on the grounds that he might find it unsettling if he didn't recognise the people calling him "Dad", but in fact it never seems to be a problem if I forget.  On my first visit after the onset of his illness, almost exactly a year ago, he knew who I was, but thought I was still at university (that was in the 1980s), and was a little surprised by how I looked (though he said nothing uncomplimentary about my looking 25 years older than he thought I should).  Now, he's comfortable around me, but he only knows who I am when my mother tells him.

I sometimes wonder whether my father knew he was likely to develop dementia.  His mother suspected she would, as I discovered in a letter she'd written to a genealogist in the 1950s.  I'm not sure why she suspected - she was occasionally just a little "dotty" but otherwise a bright and resourceful woman who was keenly active in hobbies (President of the American Daffodil Society, strangely enough), fit, slim, and very social.

You simply don't know who will develop dementia - it seems to attack the most unlikely people, regardless of fitness, social and mental activity, age, or any other clear indicator.   Having said that, Alzheimer's Research UK is funding a great deal of research, including studies that try to identify causes or indicators of the disease.  There has been a great deal of progress in this area, and with any luck there will soon be reliable ways to detect it early and to treat it before it destroys much of the brain.

If you would like to help fund this research, why not click the donation link at the top right of this blog?  I would be very grateful indeed if you would sponsor me to run the London Marathon in support of Alzheimer's Research UK - they are a fantastic charity making possible real progress in understanding and treating this increasingly common and destructive disease.