Alzheimer's Club

Former Canadian astronaut Roberta Bondar is crossing a new frontier with another mission.

Canada's first woman in space and the world's first neurologist astronaut is lending her name to support a national Alzheimer's disease awareness program named Mission for Memories.

"I'm striving to share the knowledge and the insight that I've gained in neurology," said Bondar, who is hosting a public forum on the debilitating disease at the Douglas Hospital in Montreal tonight with an emphasis on early diagnosis and treatment.

"There are medications out there to help. There is no cure but there's hope that there will be some day," Bondar said.

When Bondar completed her post-graduate thesis on Alois Alzheimer and his early research, the brain was an inaccessible frontier.

"When I went into medicine the CT scan had just come out. Up until that time, the brain was in a black box. The only way to get at it was indirectly, either by doing an autopsy or doing surgery - taking a piece of tissue out.

"So we have come a long way since then. We can now put patients in functional MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging machines) and see where the hotspots are. These are incredible leaps."

Alzheimer's is a progressive degenerative disease that causes tangles and plaques in the brain. The disease is characterized by a decline in memory and mental abilities. An estimated 420,000 Canadians age 65 and older have Alzheimer's or a related dementia.

Early diagnoses and treatment of Alzheimer's can help stave off the symptomatic progression of the disease, but only continued research will find the causes and a cure, Bondar said.

There are many advances on the horizon, she said.

"We've found certain cells inside the brain - hidden cells that can rejuvenate - and that we are looking at to try to maybe implant in people with memory loss and other neurologic diseases," she said. "It's very exciting. This is something we didn't know about 10 years ago."

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the identification of Alzheimer's disease.

Bondar's visit to Montreal is the second in a series of public forums planned in six cities across Canada to mark the milestone and highlight important treatment advances.

"It's more exciting now than 30 years ago when I was studying it because of the advances in technology and the fact that the international community is involved," she said.

Douglas researchers recently found that consumption of black and green tea may reduce the risk of age-related degenerative disease. It's among several studies in recent years to tout the benefits of tea.

A Japanese study concluded that drinking tea lowers the prevalence of cognitive impairment. Published last month, the study, which analyzed more than 1,000 Japanese subjects age 70 or older, revealed that people who drank more than two cups of green tea per day had a 50 per cent lower chance of having cognitive impairment compared with those who drank less than three cups per week.

The Quebec forum will be held tonight between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. at the Douglas Hospital, 6875 LaSalle Blvd., in Verdun. Admission is free.

Source: Charlie Fidelman. Launching into Alzheimer's territory. The Gazette (4 April 2006) [FullText]