We are paying the price for living longer, collecting degenerative diseases along the way. Cancer is only one. Others are heart and brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinsons.
Aaron Ciechanover
People's genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer's.
Adam Cohen
People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
Amy Tan
I started out as a neurologist. I then trained in neuropathology and was focused on neurodegeneration. So, for years, I studied Alzheimer's, aging, Parkinson's, that kind of thing.
Ann McKee
If I know I'm at genetically high risk of Alzheimer's, maybe I don't plan to retire at 80, and maybe I'm more proactive about where I'm going to live and who's going to take care of me.
Anne Wojcicki
Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Traditionally, when you talk to people who have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, they'll talk about how they're in five or six studies, and they've been sequenced by each study. That's just fat in the system. Just have a single data set that then you can share. You can make the entire system more efficient.
I originally got very interested in memory in high school when my grandmother came to live with us. She had been diagnosed with dementia. It was the first time I had heard the word 'Alzheimer's disease.'
Anthony Doerr
There's no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don't meet people who want to get Alzheimer's disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.
Aubrey de Grey
As life expectancy extends beyond 80 years in some parts of the world, more people are struggling with brain diseases. For older people, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other conditions become a major impediment to quality of life.
Bill Maris
My mum was a wonderful mother. She died, aged 80, of Alzheimer's disease, which was dreadful to watch. I remember she said to me: 'Believe in yourself because no one else is going to do it for you.' I'm sure a lot of my success is due to her words of advice.
Bonnie Tyler
My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love.
Alzheimer's is a horrible thing. Some people are naive about it. They think, 'Oh it's just your memory,' but my mother was in terrible pain. Your body closes down. She didn't know if she'd eaten or if she wanted to eat. She couldn't remember how to walk. Towards the end, she didn't know us. It came gradually, then it got worse.
I am committed to helping Alzheimer's Society in any way I can. My family and I rely on the help of organisations like Alzheimer's Society to help us understand the disease and guide us in the care of my grandmother. It's been a privilege to meet so many people with dementia.
Carey Mulligan
As a physician, I treated hundreds of patients who needed long-term care, including ones with Alzheimer's.
Charles Boustany
As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.
Charlie Pierce
One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimer's - and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you - is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.
In 1989, my father died after a prolonged struggle with Alzheimer's disease. All four of his siblings followed him into the shadow lands of that fascinating, maddening affliction.
I think I'm getting a little bit of Alzheimer's. Just a little.
Christopher Walken
In a prime-time address, President Bush said he backed limited federal funding for stem cell research. That's right, the President said, this is a quote, the research could help cure brain diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and whatever it is I have.
Conan O'Brien
The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.
New drugs and surgical techniques offer promise in the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's, tuberculosis, AIDS, and a host of other life-threatening diseases. Animal research has been, and continues to be, fundamental to advancements in medicine.
As we get better at reversing aging it will be possible to take one medicine and within weeks feel and even look younger. Imagine going to a doctor to get a pill for diabetes, and this same medicine will prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and will give you more vitality too.
The ultimate goal is to have a pill that can prevent or reverse all diseases of aging. The major diseases that I'd like to tackle are heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer. I want to reduce those diseases by 10 percent.
Alzheimer's is a devastating disease. It was painful for me and my family to watch my grandfather deteriorate. We must find a cure for this horrible disease.
Inflammation is the cornerstone of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis - all of the neurodegenerative diseases are really predicated on inflammation.
Alzheimer's is a disease for which there is no effective treatment whatsoever. To be clear, there is no pharmaceutical agent, no magic pill that a doctor can prescribe that will have any significant effect on the progressive downhill course of this disease.
The bottom line is that this author, a practicing neurologist dealing with Alzheimer's disease on a daily basis, believes we need to expand the public awareness that modifiable lifestyle factors have a profound role to play in determining who will or won't get this disease.
Even slight elevations in blood sugar have been shown to increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination.
I don't want to give up living, because I enjoy it so much, and I love working - I don't expect I'll ever have to stop. But Alzheimer's or something like that would render me pretty useless.
I lost my mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and we had to relocate my dad after 58 years in the family home. That was tough.
Not much shocked me. You know, I worked in a home for Alzheimer's patients and my dad used to be really into murders and stuff, so I saw dead bodies. It desensitised me to a lot of things.
It may act as an ancillary factor, but by itself, the mutation in tau doesn't give you Alzheimer's disease. This is not to say the tau is not very important. It may be important in propagating the disorder from one cell to another. But as a causal mechanism, the evidence is strongest for beta amyloid abnormalities.
When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.
I became demented overnight. Sudden onset is one factor that distinguishes my form of dementia from the more common form associated with Alzheimer's disease.
If my dramatic career doesn't work out, I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and other motor neuron diseases. It's a very exciting field of research. But I'd like to continue in drama, so it wouldn't be very smart of me if I blew this amazing opportunity with an inappropriate lifestyle.
Even if your parents don't have Alzheimer's or aren't in a wheelchair, your parents get old - if you're lucky to have parents who live for a long time. It's a challenge, and it's difficult and lovely and touching and awful and ghastly and real.
My mother had Alzheimer's, and it's a desperately, desperately cruel thing to witness.
I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer's disease where they slowly began to recover other people's lost memories.
I don't have Alzheimer's. I have part-timer's.
We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami.
As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer's disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer's disease. You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.
If out of concern over cloning, the U.S. Congress succeeds in criminalizing embryonic stem-cell research that might bring treatments for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes - and Dr. Fukuyama lent his name to a petition that supported such laws - there would be real victims: present and future sufferers of those diseases.
My grandfather had Alzheimer's. He would eat everything and anything that was around; then he wouldn't remember that he ate it and would demand to be fed again.
In addition to relieving patient suffering, research is needed to help reduce the enormous economic and social burdens posed by chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
I play an 89-year-old man whose wife has Alzheimer's in a movie called 'Still.' I play a World War II veteran, I acted with my son and it's called 'Memorial Day.'
I do mean this - I had the good fortune of being around a number of Alzheimer's patients in the last three years of my mother's life. She was in a care facility that was devoted to just people with memory-loss issues. I found those people engaging and generous in ways that I had not imagined.
