In a word: Alzheimer’s

You may or may not have yet seen the film Still Alice for which Julianne Moore deservedly won the Oscar for best actress recently. A fairly pedestrian piece of work, it is rescued by Ms Moore's performance and indeed by her casting. She has that genuinely vulnerable and befuddled look which makes her well suited to the role. She plays an academic who suffers early- onset Alzheimer's disease, a truly terrifying predicament. In my book it is, probably, the third-worst disease known to humankind.

Top of that grim list has to be motor neurone disease, whereby the body simply shuts down muscle after muscle until, eventually, the involuntary ones go. And all this while the mind remains an unimpaired witness to such horror. Its only mercy is that the disease is, comparatively, short-lived though I knew one man who fought it all the way for five years through his 50s before it won out, as he knew it would. He refused to go gentle. Bless him.

Second would be multiple sclerosis, where the nervous system gradually collapses. There may be remissions and it can go on for years.

And third from the top would be Alzheimer’s disease, the most obvious sign of which is gradual loss of memory. Then identity. Then the self.

For the sufferer the early years have to be the most terrifying, imagining what may lie ahead. But as time advances, that no longer matters and the person disappears. It is then the main sufferers become the nearest and dearest, as well as the affected person’s carers.

In the broad panoply of human suffering this trinity of diseases stands out for awfulness and, while it is a reflex to blame humanity for much of the misery in the world today, it does not apply where these diseases are concerned.

An older friend of my own developed symptoms akin to Alzheimer’s. A tumour ate into the memory function of her brain, gradually depriving her of who she was. It was operated on unsuccessfully and she died, mercifully, within four months of diagnosis. But her last months were a sad, tragic, despairing insight into the reality of living with Alzheimer’s.

The disease is named after German psychiatrist and pathologist Alois Alzheimer who, only in 1901, identified the first case of pre-senile dementia which became known as Alzheimer’s disease.