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C URCUMIN —T HE 21 ST C ENTURY C URE
The downhill memory slide takes its victims from normal com-
petency with occasional memory lapses to the loss of the ability to
function in the normal world to inevitable death with no apparent
mindfulness. Sadly, conventional medicine offers no really effective
treatment. The few pharmaceuticals on the market have minimal
effects even in slowing the progression of the disease.
The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than
5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s. Most of them are over
60, although there is an increasing rate of early onset Alzheimer’s
that can begin as early as the 30s. The frightening statistic is that
if you’re lucky to live to the age of 85, you have a 50-50 chance
of developing dementia.
Alzheimer’s is inevitably a fatal disease, but it rarely kills quick-
ly. Mercifully, people with dementia often have other diseases that
take them away before the terrible onset of late-stage dementia.
BIOLOGY OF ALZHEIMER’S
Here’s a little painless biology that explains how normal brain cells
work:
I like to think of neurons, dendrites and synapses as an electri-
cal system in the brain through which thought processes and con-
scious and unconscious biological functions take place. Neurons,
the brain cells, grow large finger-like projections called dendrites
that function very much like wiring in an electrical system. Each
neuron has at least one dendrite in and another out in this electri-
cal grid that sends a charge to the next dendrite across a tiny space
called a synapse. Scientists once thought that we are born with all
of the neurons and dendrites we will ever possess, but they’ve
recently learned that over our lifetimes we can grow new neurons
and even expand our network of dendrites exponentially in a
process called neurogenesis. Some neurons may have hundreds or
even thousands of dendrites.
Continuing our analogy of the electrical wiring system, you can
see that if one wire becomes damaged, thousands of alternative