Rant #2,428: Forget

The title for this Rant is the perfect segueway from Friday's Rant, where some of that entry had to do with the Dave Clark Five, as "Forget" is the title of one of their lesser-known songs.

It is also a very basic description of Alzheimer's Disease, the real life "Walking Dead" that many people suffer from later in life.

Doctors and researchers have been trying to find a cure for this affliction for generations, and so far, we know more about the disease, but not enough to kick it.

We know how to stave it off a bit with drugs, and even with brain exercises so our brains don't rot away with inactivity.

But now we know another sign that Alzheimer's could be coming on: excessive napping.

According to research published in "Alzheimer's and Dementia," a peer reviewed journal, changes in sleep patterns years prior to actually getting the disease might be an early warning sign of its coming later on in life.

And it has to do with napping. If napping was never part of your sleep routine, and it has increasingly become part of that routine, then there might be need to worry.

If you have pretty much always been a napper--taking short breaks to go to sleep during the day--then you probably have nothing to worry about, according to these findings, which were made by a group of researchers from several California universities.

Sleep changes might represent the death of brain cells related to Alzheimer's Disease, and perhaps the most important element of this research was that it was found that entire sets of brain neurons related to keeping us awake are wiped out by the disease, and thus, those who may be prone to developing the disease often compensate for this loss by taking naps.

Further research is needed, of course, but this could be another rung to ladder leading up to a cure for the dreaded disease.

I have written in the past about my grandmother, my father's mother, who developed this dreaded disease later in life.

She probably was on the path to it for years before, but back then, nobody really knew very much about Alzheimer's. If was often shrugged off as what happens when one "gets old," or it was mixed up with dementia, which it is related to, but still separate and different from it.

I remember that my grandmother went from a cheerful person who was full of life to a person that was just existing, not knowing what was happening, not knowing her loved ones, not knowing to eat and dress, and a person who would not be able to live out her life on her own terms.

Her last months were absolutely horrid. As the disease started to permeate her very being, you could see by her face that she often did not know where she was or why she was there. We have photos of her at my wedding in 1993 that clearly show this.

The symptoms would come and go at that time. At times, she could be herself. I remember one particular incident, in 1995, right after my son was born, where he was being very fussy. She said that she could get him to quiet down, and she took him in her arms, and rocked him to sleep.

But those incidences were not common back then, and when she was put in an old age home some months after that, we knew that time was counting down on her.

The last time I saw her, she recognized me, but had no idea who my baby son was or who my father was.

My father promptly told me that if he ever got to that point, to get a gun and relieve him or his misery.

Of course, I could never do that, but the pain in his voice was real. He didn't ever want to end up like that, in particular to not remember his family.

My father is nearly 88 years old now, his memory is not what it once was, but thank goodness he does not have Alzheimer's. He is still resilient, runs around with my mother like people one quarter of their age, and is enjoying retirement.

He can also sleep anyone under the table, but that has been the norm for his his entire life, or at least as long as I can remember. As a kid, my father was often so tired that on the weekend, he would sleep away a day, but he worked hard, so it was a given that he craved extra sleep on the weekend.

Me, I have never been much of a sleeper--hence, the earliness of this blog--and I will take a nap on occasion on the weekend.

My son can also sleep anyone under the table, and he has slept at a clip of like 15 hours straight if we let him go that far, which we generally don't allow him to do.

But so far, Alzheimer's in our family stopped with my grandmother, and hopefully won't ever rear its ugly head again in our family.

And hopefully, with this latest bit of research, doctors are closer to cracking the Alzheimer's puzzle, so no family ever has to go through bearing the brunt of this horrible affliction ever again.