Re: Sad News from the UK

: Joe Bernstein <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
: While this is comforting *in general* (and by the way a bit of a
: kick in the pants to Connie Willis's <Passage>), it doesn't really
: do much for Pratchett *in particular*. His illness is said to be
: "rare"; it's certainly different from regular Alzheimer's, and we
: don't know by how much. It's also been "diagnosed"; I sorta thought
: the only ways to diagnose regular Alzheimer's with any confidence
: were a) symptoms and b) autopsies.

Well, his announcement mentioned that he had some symptoms (not specified)
that had been attributed to a "phantom stroke" (by which I'm guessing
is meant "transient ischemic attack") are now attributed to his
diagnosed condition.

And also, according to some googlable pages, early onset alzheimers
(and by "early" they mean "before 65 years of age") is linked to
some specific set of genes.

So. I suspect they may have some symptoms (eg, one of the symptoms of
early onset alzheimers that is more common is muscle twitching and spasm,
which I suppose could also be attributed to a tia) and possession of
the problematic genes, to get to a diagnosis.

Purely guessing, of course; plus ianad.

The bad news seems to be that early onset patients tend to decline faster
than ... "regular onset" patients. The not-so-bad aspect of the bad
news is that this difference is quite small, and there's some question
of whether it's true at all.


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

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