Lest They Forget

An attribute tom valenta once admired in his wife was the methodical way she went about things. "Say we were setting up a piece of kitchen equipment," he says. "She'd have read the instructions and made it work while I was still scratching my head trying to figure out step one." In her 30s, with the couple's three children all at school, Marie Valenta went to university to study primary school teaching, finishing each year in the top 1% of her class. More recently, she learned bookkeeping to make herself useful in the family's public relations business. She was clever? "Marie's a great believer in Edison's line that genius is 99% perspiration," says Valenta. "She was a super-organized person." Which is why he was quick to notice when she began behaving oddly a few years ago - leaving the front door open when she left the house, "vagueing out" during conversation, struggling with basic instructions. In January last year, at the age of 54, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which doctors predict will end her life within six years unless there's a breakthrough in treatment.

It's only her relatively young age that makes Marie's case unusual: she's one of 170,000 Australians with dementia, of which Alzheimer's is the most common type. The incidence of dementia is set to soar in wealthy countries as their populations age. The number of Australians 65 and over is projected to more than double, to 5.7 million, by 2041. Within 20 years, over-85s - of whom roughly a quarter have dementia - are expected to comprise 2% of the population, twice the present figure. But the problem isn't simply that there'll be more oldies. A recent report by British researchers suggests that, compared to 30 years ago, brain diseases such as Alzheimer's strike a higher proportion of people in developed countries, a trend attributed to worsening pollution and greater exposure to harmful chemicals.

Australian authorities are counterattacking. A team of health experts, assembled by the national advocacy group Alzheimer's Australia and spearheaded by American dementia expert Zaven Khachaturian, will on Sept. 20 in Sydney present a "Vision Statement" that argues "there is no time to lose" and outlines a four-point plan for delaying the onset of dementia. If that goal sounds modest, there's cause to hope for more. "This is the best of times for Alzheimer's research," says group member Colin Masters, professor of pathology at the University of Melbourne, who says drugs that could stop or reverse the disease may not be far off. Alzheimer's inexorably strips people of their memory, personality and eventually all cognitive function. Characterized by the spread of sticky plaques and clumps of tangled fiber that disrupt communication between brain cells, Alzheimer's typically kills within 5 to 10 years of onset. Partly because the majority of patients spend the last stages of the illness in government-subsidized aged-care homes, Alzheimer's is extremely costly: an Access Economics report, also to be released next week, estimates that in 2004 the disease will drain more than $A3 billion from the public purse. The thrust of the report is that any measures that can delay the onset of dementia by a few years - or at least delay the need for institutionalized care - will save billions of dollars over coming decades.