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Interviewer: Dr. Newport, you wrote a book titled "Alzheimer's Disease:
What If There Was a Cure?". Now, in that book you chronicle your husband's
battle with the disease. What were some of the first warning signs that you
saw that something out of the ordinary was up?
Mary T. Newport, M.D.: Well, very early on, Steve had a problem with
remembering appointments, taking our daughters to appointments. I would
call him up a half hour ahead of time to remind him and he would forget.
You know, that kind of thing would happen, but I just thought it was just
that he was distracted or something. But right around age 51, he began to
have a little bit more problem with doing his accounting work, for example.
He would make significant payroll mistakes, and I had to start sitting down
with him to do the payroll, which had not happened the previous 20 years.
Then I knew something was really up when he told me that couldn't remember
if he'd been to the bank and the post office on a given day. That just
seemed clearly not normal to me. You know, I couldn't imagine that I
wouldn't remember that and that was something that he did every day as part
of his job as an accountant. He was working for me at home, you know, doing
that for many years.
Interviewer: So what did you learn about the common prescription drugs as
you started to do some research into helping him? And what about those
drugs that were available? What were some of the pros and cons of the early
treatments?
Dr. Newport: There really wasn't much available. Right around 2005, Steve
was officially diagnosed as most likely having Alzheimer's disease. He had
progressed to the point where he couldn't read a map any more. He had
trouble finding his way around in a car. We had moved about an hour north
of where we lived and he couldn't really learn the layout, and it was a
very small town. And he would spend an inordinate number of hours in the
garage looking for something, and then at the end of the day, he couldn't
remember what he was looking for. So those kind of problems were happening.
We took him to a neurologist. He had an MRI, which was actually normal at
that point. He had lab work to rule out other causes of Alzheimer's, other
causes of dementia. The neurologist felt that he was seeing progression and
felt that it was time to put him on one of the medications for Alzheimer's.
So he put him on Aricept. And what Aricept does is it helps make more
acteylcholine, one of the neurotransmitters available in the brain. But the
studies for that particular medication show that it helps about half the
people and only for about six months. And my understanding is that it
wasn't studied much beyond six months, so, you know, I think it's still not
really well known what the long-term effects of these particular
medications are, both positive and negative.
So he did go on Aricept at that point, in 2005, and then about a year
later, he had an evaluation at the Byrd Alzheimer's Center in St.
Petersburg, Florida, and they agreed that he most likely had Alzheimer's.
Namenda was another drug, Memantine is the generic name of it, and this one
helps another neurotransmitter become... be more available, you know. They
work a little bit in synergy together, the Aricept and Namenda. But the
physician said not to expect great things from this. That it might help
slow down the course of the disease, you know, we couldn't really expect
much improvement and we really didn't see much difference in Steve after
either of these medications.
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Dr. Mary T. Newport's husband starting showing early signs of dementia. But was it something other than simply forgetting a few things? Dr. Newport discusses some of the red flags. She also talks about some of the common prescription treatments and the unknowns that go along with them.
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