• Losing Your Mind: Is Modern Civilization To Blame?

    March 8, 2010: by Bill Sardi

    It was November 3, 1906, at a medical meeting in Germany, when Dr. Alois Alzheimer first described a patient named “Augusta” who, at age 51, exhibited abnormal mental, language and behavior problems. Upon her death, the patient’s brain was autopsied and Dr. Alzheimer described a rare and “a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex.” Accumulation of a form of plaque, now called beta amyloid, characterizes this disease. Today about half of the current 85-plus population exhibits these same tangled, shrunken tissues in their brain that Dr. Alzheimer first observed over 100 years ago.

    Epidemiologists, medical scientists who search for the causes of disease in human populations, have been perplexed for decades over the cause of Alzheimer’s disease — the early onset (40s and 50s) of memory-impairment due to abnormal changes in the brain, compared to senile dementia which occurs later in life.

    For heretofore unexplained reasons, Alzheimer’s disease is rare, even nonexistent, in some rural undeveloped lands like India and Africa. Alzheimer’s disease appears to be a disease of modern civilization. This suggests an environmental rather than an inherited origin.

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