TOUGH TESTS

As a hospice care nurse, Linda Janke has spent the past dozen years witnessing the intense emotional and physical toll Alzheimer’s disease can take. Now Janke is witnessing the effects of Alzheimer’s closer to home: Her mother, 79, has been clinically diagnosed with the progressive, incurable, memory-stealing disease.

Statistically, having a mother with Alzheimer’s puts Janke at significantly higher risk of someday developing the disease herself. In fact, a test available just this year can tell Janke right now, long before possible symptoms even have had a chance to appear, whether proteins that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease are present in her brain. And that poses an intriguing, but emotionally wrenching, question for Janke to consider.

Does she want to know now whether she will be likely to develop Alzheimer’s someday, given that there’s nothing she could do about it anyway? “You go back and forth,” Janke says. Even now, and having nothing more than the knowledge that her mother’s Alzheimer’s puts her at greater risk, Janke admits that with the occasional momentary forgetting of a name, “my first thought is, ‘Is this a sign?’”

“I’m in my 50s, and some people develop it earlier than others. But you also know that a lot of (people) have a long time before anybody recognizes it.” The Review-Journal presents a series this week about Alzheimer’s disease and its impact on society, today and potentially in the future.

The prevalence of the disease and efforts by families to cope with it and by researchers to treat and cure it

The financial impact of the disease on families and society

Challenges for those who choose to care for their loved ones with Alzheimer’s disease at home

Alternative forms of care, from day care to assisted living and nursing homes

Identification and treatment of Alzheimer’s

Debate about the benefits of testing for Alzheimer’s

The state of Alzheimer’s research and what is needed in the future