Resisting Alzheimer's

In Tuesday’s Science Times, the writer Nancy Stearns Bercaw describes her father’s decades-long preoccupation with preventing Alzheimer’s disease, which had killed her grandfather. Alzheimer’s was the reason her father became a neurologist in the first place, she writes: he “knew it was coming.”


As an ever-present reminder of that threat, he kept an atrophied brain in a jar on his desk. That brain, I recently discovered, belonged to his father.


As my father approached middle age he began to experiment on himself, with diet supplements. By age 60 he was taking 78 tablets a day. He tracked down anything that offered the possibility of saving brain cells and killing free radicals: Omega 3s, 6s, 9s; vitamins E and C; ginkgo biloba, rosemary and sage; folic acid; flaxseed.


After retiring from his neurology practice in Naples, Fla., he spent hours a day doing math. Even when I was visiting, he’d sit silently on his leather recliner with a calculator to verify the accuracy of calculations he did by memory.


Read the full essay, “When All Isn’t Enough to Foil Alzheimer’s,” and share your thoughts in the comments section.