Posted on 11/01/2010 10:18:41 AM PDT by Racehorse
As a top adviser in a multinational financial services company, Susan Grant 59, was used to effortlessly juggling numbers, client details and other complex information in her head. So when she found her thoughts so muddled she couldn't remember if she needed to take the interstate north or south to drive home, she knew something was wrong.
“I'd find myself talking to clients and unable to think of a word,” she recalled. “So I'd stop in the middle of a sentence — and then I couldn't remember the sentence itself.”
A series of medical tests resulted in six diagnoses — everything from Alzheimer's to drug overuse — before her condition was finally identified: frontotemporal disease, or FTD.
FTD is a term used to describe several little-known disorders that progressively damage the parts of the brain that are in charge of personality, decision-making and language. Also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration or Pick's disease, FTD often is confused with — and misdiagnosed as — Alzheimer's disease. Yet while Alzheimer's destroys memory, FTD changes behavior. An easygoing person becomes aggressive. Someone fun-loving and outgoing is suddenly passive and withdrawn.
But the most alarming difference between Alzheimer's and FTD is the age at which it strikes. While Alzheimer's is primarily a disease of the aged, FTD tends to occur between ages 40 and 65 — hence the nickname “baby boomer dementia.” It can affect people as young as their 20s.
“It hits in the prime of life,” said Sarah Oxford, executive director of the San Antonio-based Frontotemporal Disease Association. “Most FTD patients are in their most productive years. They're mid-career, with families, young children. The effects can be devastating.”
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
and saccharin and aspartame...too many Diet Colas.
Don’t forget Vitamin D...at least 1000 units a day.
My heart and prayers go out to these care givers,,,
My Mom is 90yo and has to be in a nursing home,,,(lock in).
She started to wander off and didn’t know where she was,,,
GOD make me dead before You make me old...
I wonder.
Is it possible there is more than one type of prion?
Could there be a ‘mild’ form of CJD out in the wild - one with a similar cause, but less extreme in symptoms?
I mean, there are various types of bacteria. Various types of virii. Why not various types of harmful proteins?
He hates me cuz I’m beautiful. :)
Absolutely! I take one every day. People don't get outside often enough to get the benefits of the sun. Doctor recommended it for my husband way back, but now, it's an effort to get him to take the smalles pill.
Just remember, your mother is probably happy. It's the loved ones who suffer. And, health care will do its best to make sure you are dead before you get old. Trust Obama in that respect.
You have a bigger chance of causing harm to yourself or others by getting into an automobile and driving somewhere than someone does smoking pot.
How hard is that to understand?
Claiming to support freedom and liberty and then turning around and stating people are a danger to themselves and can not be trusted to make their own decisions and advocating to take away certain freedoms is pretty stupid and hypocritical.
I've learned hypocrites are everywhere when it comes to political ideology.
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