Researchers at Arizona State Universtity have detected changes in Former President Ronald Reagan’s speech pattern that may well have predicted the onset of Alzheimer’s years before the official diagnosis in 1994. Visar Berisha and Julia Liss developed an algorithm that identifies patterns such as repetitive words and the substitution of nonspecific words like “thing” for specific nouns. This discovery is of tremendous value since the future of effective therapies will be targeted to a population at risk years before the full blown symptoms of the disease present. It was noted that surgery and anesthesia from the 1981 assination attempt on the President may have played a role in his decline.
From a personal standpoint, I think this goes without saying. My mother had a thoracotomy in 2009 for what appeared to be an aggressive lung tumor. She was a non-smoker but one can never rule out the effects of years of second hand smoke from my father (who died of lung cancer). Mom was rushed into surgery and we were so relieved to find that the ominous tumor turned out to be nothing but some scar tissue. What we weren’t prepared for was the immediate decline that followed in her cognative and motor skills. In fact, the anesthesia pushed her into a week long delerium. She never bounced back to her baseline and was even dismissed from a clinical trial that she was enrolled in because she could no longer give enough reliable verbal feedback to study her. In her case, we regretted treating a “cancer” that wasn’t there but had it been a real threat to her life, it raises the question of how surgeries should be handled in those already showing some signs of cognative impairment. More attention needs to be placed on the types of anesthesia that are being used and other possible alternatives. With so many undiagnosed cases of Alzheimer’s ticking away as time bombs, shouldn’t everyone be treated with the same caution before undergoing surgical procedures?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/health/parsing-ronald-reagans-words-for-early-signs-of-alzheimers.html?WT.mc_id=2015-APRIL-FACEBOOK-PROPENSITY_HEALTH-AUD_DEV-0401-0430&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVAPRIL&_r=0
Paul Hosefros The New York Times 1983
Interstingly, transcripts of speeches by George H.W. Bush were also analyzed alongside those of Ronald Reagan’s and no such decline in speech patterns were detected as he aged.
