Would you want to know?
posted in Issues, News, Science |Right around the same time that my female hormones really went around the bend (aka “perimenopause”), I began to have a whole slew of side effects. Hot flashes, a hell-on-wheels hair-trigger temper, a sex drive that tanked, and memory issues.
Each of these taken separately was a total pain in the ass. Taken as a whole, it’s a personality disaster. But, even so, most of it is stuff you can grit your teeth and grin and bear, or take various nostrums to deal with.
One aspect, however, really, really bothers me, and that’s the memory problems.
The thing that bothers me is not the fact that I have them–everyone has memory lapses, and walking into a room and suddenly realizing you can’t remember what you went in there for was nothing new and exciting to me, just something to take in stride.
What was disturbing, however, was the form the memory problems took.
I pride myself on my vocabulary. My ability to flit from word to word. My personal OED sitting at my neuron-tips, just waiting for the right shading of meaning to pull the proper word out of the mental dictionary.
The form my perimenopausal memory problems took–and still take–is one where very simple words elude me. I’ll be talking, and suddenly, instead of, say, “oven”, my mind and mouth will say, “refrigerator”. It’s always a somewhat related word, just slightly skewed. And worse than that are the times where I simply cannot recall the word I want to use. At all. I find myself saying, “the place where all the food is kept cold” and waving my hand about as if to pull the proper word out of the ether.
The thing that scares me most in terms of getting old is Alzheimer’s disease.
No-one in my family has had it, that I know of; we’ve been remarkably lucky in that as we age, we suffer from all sorts of icky age-related diseases but still retain full mental faculties. Diabetes? Yup. Cancer? Yup. Heart disease? Yup. Alzheimer’s? Nope.
Coming from a family that is so rich in folks with excellent mental abilities and a lively love of mental games and learning and puzzles…all of those things are prized possessions to me. The thought of losing those abilities…the thought of having to depend on someone else because I was losing my own ability to think…these thoughts scare the snot out of me. It’s my very deepest fear.
Researchers have recently come up with 16 protein markers in the bloodstream that serve as markers for Alzheimer’s, with a 90% success rate.
Would you want to know?
I read that story and my first thought was, “Hah! Now I can get a test and find out if my specific type of memory lapse is a symptom of Something Worse!”
Then I thought again. Firstly, of course, is the 90% success rate, which implies a 10% failure rate. The articles I’ve read didn’t say whether that 10% was 10% false positives (”Why, Jane! I am so sorry that seven years ago we diagnosed you with Alzheimer’s; it turns out you’re one of the lucky folk who actually won’t get it!”) or false negatives (”George, we’re sorry, but it turns out that we were wrong; you are developing Alzheimer’s very quickly.”).
Secondly…well, secondly. What would you live like if you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were developing Alzheimer’s. That even though nothing showed up currently in your personality, all the signposts were there indicating that every day, bit by bit, your brain was decaying, and after a certain point you would no longer exist as a person. That in a few years, your loved ones would be dealing with you-as-a-burden, someone who no longer recognizes them and no longer loves them.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’d like to think that I’m the type to find out and face reality. But at the same time, it’s so much easier to live with a “maybe” than with a “for sure”.
What would you do? Would you want to know?
