New Form of Dementia Discovered
One of the most researched diseases is that of forgetting. As of recently, doctors have discovered a relatively new type of dementia that may be more common than Alzheimer’s disease. The disease is known as LATE, limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy. The full name typically describes the area in the brain where the person is most likely affected. It also refers to a protein that is the center of the disease.
In the article, “Doctors newly define another type of dementia, sometimes mistaken for Alzheimer’s,” by Michael Nedelman, it is stated by the author that “doctors say the two [Alzheimer’s and LATE] are frequently found together, and in those cases may lead to a steeper cognitive decline than either by itself.” What led medical professionals to put two and two together was the years of reports that have been building for a while. Doctors have noticed over the years that there have been patients who haven’t exactly fit the mold for Alzheimer’s, but hadn’t known what it was that they had. Doctors are aware that there isn’t only one form of dementia, but many doctors tend to lean towards Alzheimer’s when the symptoms appear so similar. A primary reason why doctors may have trouble diagnosing patients with a form of dementia is because it can be pretty random depending on the patient. In Michael Nedelman’s article, he claims that “experts say this heterogeneity [diversity] has complicated dementia research, including Alzheimer’s, because it hasn’t always been clear what the root cause was--and thus, if doctors were treating the right thing.”
Age-related diseases like dementia are often associated with a glop of protein that causes the disease. Different proteins are found to contribute to different diseases. In Alzheimer’s, the proteinaceous glop is usually seen as one set of glops. The protein found to cause LATE is the protein TDP-43. Over ten years ago, doctors had first connected TDP-43 to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS. The protein was also found to be linked to frontotemporal lobar degeneration, another form of dementia. What has also been discovered is that LATE is 100 times more common than either of those two diseases, yet it was only very recently discovered. In autopsy studies, experts claim that between 20-50% of people over the age of 80 will be likely to experience brain complications associated with LATE.
LATE can often be treated with a variety of drugs that deal with dementia. Unlike Alzheimer’s, LATE doesn’t yet currently have a specific drug to target it. The best drug to currently battle it is Memantine, which is a drug meant to treat any form of dementia closely associated with Alzheimer’s.
LATE is relatively similar to Alzheimer’s and mimics the same symptoms. Diagnosed memory loss is a severely common thing in the United States, especially for the elderly. What many people don’t realize is what the people with these diseases have to go through. In Beate Lakotta’s article “You Turn Into a Person You Don’t Know Anymore,” he interviews a famous Alzheimer patient named Richard Taylor. Richard Taylor was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 58 and has received his fame after writing a book about his experiences with it. In the interview, Taylor claims that “everyone with dementia should try out writing. I started writing because I was petrified that I would wake up one morning and a curtain would have fallen down separating me from the rest of the world. I thought that if I read everyday about what I’d done the day before I would know whether I was still okay.”
Many people often think that dementia makes a person no longer a person anymore, so they are treated differently. Taylor also recalled a story about a time he’d went to a hairdresser and had experienced a very uncomfortable response from the hairdresser. “I once went to the hairdresser and my brother was with me. We chatted, and the hairdresser said that her father had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I said, "I have Alzheimer's too." Whereupon she turned to my brother and asked him: "How does he want his hair cut?" The hairdresser treated Richard Taylor like he wasn’t capable of telling them what he wanted his hair to look like.