The End of Semagacestat 23 Aug 2010, 9:10 am
Here’s an interesting article in the New York Times about the failure of one of hundreds of drugs designed to slow the decline of Alzheimer’s. Eli Lilly recently halted their extensive and expensive trial of semagacestat becaue the drug was actually making patients worse. Lilly spent hundreds of millions on this drug, the Times [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John
Atul Gawande in The New Yorker 16 Aug 2010, 10:03 am
I’ve read a hundred articles and books about dying. The best of them all is Atul Gawande’s piece in the August 2nd New Yorker, “Letting Go,” in which he writes about the choice that must sometimes be made between fighting to stay alive (or keep a patient alive), and accepting an approaching death. Gawande is [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
Pinned Like A Bug 8 Aug 2010, 7:14 am
I’m back at my dad’s house, sleeping in the same little room where I lived for the last year of his life. Things have changed, of course. My family is here (or most of us), and off we go to the beach, we go kayaking, we play badminton and cook dinners on the grill. But in [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
Essay in The Sun 31 Jul 2010, 10:59 pm
The Sun, an elegant, ad-free magazine full of good personal and political writing, has published an essay of mine, “Just Shoot Me,” in their August issue: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/ The essay begins: “My father, as he approaches his own death, never speaks about it. But I know he’s thought it through and wants to avoid a lingering, painful [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John
Mistreatment of Alzheimer’s Patients 30 Jun 2010, 12:42 pm
Here’s a scary report. According to Alzheimer’s Daily News, “A recent study by UC Irvine’s Center of Excellence on Elder Abuse and Neglect examined mistreatment of elderly who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or similar disorders. The study found that nearly half (47%) of the 129 participants in the study with Alzheimer’s had suffered some [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
Smacked by A Pair of Stories 21 Jun 2010, 7:40 pm
I’m healthy. I feel reasonably spry, and am about to head off on a canoe trip with an old friend, Deerfield Academy class of 1960, down a river in Nebraska. (We made the same trip last year and didn’t see another soul on the river for five days.) But just last week I attended my fiftieth [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
A Cup of Black Coffee 31 May 2010, 9:16 am
I look back with some dismay at a conversation I had with my friend Sandy Weymouth, during the time I was looking after my father (it’s in the book): “He never asks for food and never asks for water,” I said. “How long have you waited?” [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
In The Stillness 27 May 2010, 11:19 am
I went back to Cape Cod last week for an Alzheimer’s Memory Walk. Long trip for a short walk, but I couldn’t resist, as the walk started just a hundred yards from my father’s house in Harwich. I’ve been back to my dad’s house—now owned by my brother—every year since my father died, in 2005. [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
Brutal NIH Report 1 May 2010, 9:44 am
Every day I receive an email alert about Alzheimer’s developments from http://alznews.org. A couple of days ago two contradictory messages showed up at once. One of them was a standard-issue note about the advantages of exercise, and how it was good for the brain. So many things are supposed to be good for the brain, and [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
The Other Life, The One We Long to See 19 Apr 2010, 4:25 pm
“There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.” ––James Salter, in Light Years. I think this is what I find so electrifying about Alzheimer’s memoirs. Dementia [...]Source: The Last of His Mind | John Thorndike
