Unbelievable value!

When I signed up to run for Alzheimer's Research UK, they sent me a fundraising pack to help me along - full of ideas, information, and the inevitable logo'd pen and balloon.  Of most interest to me so far has been their newsletter, "think", which includes articles about the research they're funding.

A nice haircut - but is it worth as much as
2.5 hours of Alzheimer's Disease research?

What surprised me most is not how good the research is - I knew that from their website and from articles about dementia research worldwide.  No, the surprise bit of info is that their research only costs £20 per hour!  Now, what can you get in this day and age for £20 per hour?  I got my hair cut today, and that took about an hour including washing it, consultation, and so on.  The bill for an excellent salon experience?  Fifty pounds!  So that's 2.5 hours of dementia research by talented academics at leading universities, vs a one-hour haircut in a provincial salon.  Much as I like the cut, I don't feel it is equivalent in value to 2.5 hours of research into Alzheimer's Disease.   However, that's really not a reflection on the value of the cut - it's an indication of just what good value UK research represents.

[As a small aside, note the way one of my eyes looks wide open and the other is starting to close.  That's a trait that comes from my dad (the guy I blogged about last time, who has Alzheimer's Disease), and my brother and I both have it.  Often one eye is actually closed in photos, though I try hard not to as it looks a little strange.  Having said that, giving the camera a hard stare looks a little strange too.]

But back to the point.  Here is an example of research currently being funded by Alzheimer's Research UK.  The people carrying out the project had already discovered that when rats were fed a diet so high in fat that their bodies stopped responding properly to insulin ("insulin resistance"), they developed memory problems.  The current project aims to test diabetes drugs, which help the body respond better to insulin, as a possible measure to prevent memory decline.  This makes a lot of sense, given that insulin plays an important role in laying down memories, as was discussed in the New Scientist article a couple of months ago on this subject.  Alzheimer's Research UK is providing just £61K for this project - not much more than the price of a couple of family cars, but it could lead to a drug to prevent Alzheimer's - something we simply don't have at the moment.   For the cost of just a couple of cars!  Given how many people are expected to develop dementia over the next few decades, this is phenomenally good value.  Even if the research doesn't provide a prevention drug, it will give us more understanding of the relationship between insulin and Alzheimer's Disease.

So, if you click the donation link in the top right of this page, and give just £20 (25 euros, 33 dollars) to Alzheimer's Research UK, that will fund yet another hour of research - all down to you!  Go on - do it, and then pick an hour in a working day sometime in the future, and put it in your diary.  When that hour comes around, go and celebrate the research being done that you funded!

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.

To what purpose?

I mentioned previously that I have not had a life-long ambition to run the marathon.  I used to enjoy a morning run, about 7K or so, along quiet country lanes, but a city run amidst crowds and pollution would not normally strike me as an attractive proposition, even if I were fit - which I am not.

But of course I do have some purpose.  Yes, I was carried away by the spirit of the thing after the 2012 London Marathon and Richard's successful performance.  That, however, does not constitute purpose - it's a year on, and the emotions have long since faded.  So why am I running?

In fact, I already knew what I wanted to do when I was watching Richard run.  It's not the running - it's the support for a favourite charity that attracts me.  You raise funds, you publicise your chosen cause through fundraising and running in their jersey (and blogging about them).  And I know my cause - I want to run for Alzheimer's research.

Conveniently, there really is a charity in this country that does exactly that: Alzheimer's Research UK.  They don't spend money on hospices, nursing care, advice lines, or any of those other important but fundamentally short-term fixes.  They fund quality research into the causes, diagnosis, treatments, and prevention - activities with long-term value.

Right side normal, left shows shrinkage due to Alzheimer's 

And this is a phonemenally exciting time for Alzheimer's research!  Scientists are finally beginning to understand the chemical mechanisms that lead to the creation of the characteristic amyloid plaques that stop brain cells from working properly, destroying old memories and preventing new ones from being laid down.  Now that they have a grip on the pathways that lead to Alzheimer's disease, they have a chance to find ways to put obstacles in that path - to stop Alzheimer's in its tracks.  It could potentially even mean rolling the disease back, perhaps one day even curing it.  In short, the work that is being done now is extremely productive, because it is far more likely to result in successful treatment of this awful disease than research 10 years ago.  Money invested is money well spent.

Moreover, the UK is a good place to invest your research money.   Scientific articles in the dementia field here are very high quality - with a citation impact (how often other articles refer to yours) second only to Sweden's, and above that of the USA.  This is nothing to get patriotic about - dementia research benefits everyone around the world - medical research advances are a product available to all.  Investing where the research produces the highest quality results makes sense, and Alzheimer's Research UK is the leading charity providing funding in this area.

Of course, I am not only attracted to this area because investing in this research has high returns.  Granted, with my MBA, I do think about value.  But the real reason I am so interested is that my father has Alzheimers - and his mother had vascular dementia, two of my mother's uncles had Alzheimer's... in other words, it's really common in my family.  Yes, there is a large helping of self-interest in all of this.  Although it's undoubtedly too late for research to help my father, it could help many of my other relatives, and perhaps even me one day.  And perhaps you.

Before I begin: the research period

So if you knew you needed to run 26.2 miles in 29 weeks' time, what would you do first?  Get out and do some road training?  Not if you're me you wouldn't - you'd go online and start reading up. 

I checked PubMed for interesting medical research on long distance running.  I looked up marathon training programmes and advice, and scoured the Virgin London Marathon magazine for helpful information (mostly it contained ads).  Once I'd done all this, with varying success, we headed for the bookshops of Bath.  We decided to give Toppings a miss - just because it's at the top of town, so we'd either be carrying books up and down the hill or would have to climb the hill a second time.  Granted, with the marathon in mind, that shouldn't have bothered me, but there was my family to consider, of course.

So the first stop was the local branch of Waterstones, where the staff are friendly and the books are numerous.  There was nothing I really felt taken by, but I picked up a generalist book by Matt Roberts called Get Running.  It's not quite Dorling Kindersley, but it has attractive people (airbrushed?) in instructive photographs, and relatively straightforward content on how to start a running programme.

Mr B's understands the importance of a place to sit

Our next destination was our favourite independent bookseller outside London - Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights on John Street.  This is a book person's bookstore - an eclectic selection of whatever takes Mr B's fancy, carefully organised and displayed with many little notes about what the staff think of the books, spread out over 5 little rooms on three floors.  It is sort of an anti-Waterstones - tiny and personal, and full of many "perfect books" which are hard to pass over as you seek the sort of book you came in for, but which you couldn't have described until you'd found it.  And in the sport section I did indeed fine my book: Marathon Running: from beginner to elite, 4th edition, by Richard Nerurkar.  I'd never heard of him, but I'd heard of Haile Gebrselassie, who is quoted on the front as saying "if you want to run a marathon, or a faster one, you have to read this book!"   Well, I do, and I'm prepared to take his word for it.  So I have the book.

Now  armed with medical literature references, two books, a Runner's World magazine, and the beginnings of advice from friends and relatives, I feel ready to put my running shoes on.  Not that I've read everything.  I've dipped in, got the gist, made up my mind.  Sometimes, that's all research really needs to be.