A rather disturbing truth about Alzheimer's disease is that 30% of us will develop it. That is one in 3 people.
The rest of us will not be untouched as they will have to care for those with the disease.
These are some of the scary realities of the future of this disease.
Alzheimer's apparently exists when neurons can no longer effectively communicate and thus the neuron associations which make up memories of all kinds, are no longer workable and memories are thus inaccessible.
These lost memories ultimately include biological functionality programming and therefore the brain is eventually unable to perform its tasks in management of our physiology, resulting in our demise.
In an experiment which was conducted over decades, a thousand nuns were monitored and found untouched by this disease and this led to a conclusion that the nature of their brain activity, a result of their lifestyle, resulted in their being impervious to the effects of the disease.
The way in which neurons communicate is through the production of chemicals which interact between synapses, which are essentially receptors/transmitters for facilitating communication.
One of the chemicals produced in this process tends under certain circumstances to accumulate and ultimately preclude further communication between the associating neurons.
It is believed that a mind which is more educated and which interacts more effectively with others in a greater variety of ways, effectively establishes more connections between neurons which provide a high degree of redundancy in that connections destroyed by Alzheimer's have no effect on the communication mechanism as multiple connections are in place for each set of neuron associations.
What this effectively means for us is the we can avoid the impact of this chemical malfunction by nurturing a very active mind which establishes more robust memory associations through more numerous and diverse associations.
An example of this would be associating an acquaintance not only with one incident or other person but rather developing a more complete picture of their associations with other things and people in your life.
This means that being more observant, interested in others, caring for others and thorough in establishing understanding of the world around us insulates us against the devastating effects of the physiological malfunction phenomenon which manifests as Alzheimer's disease.
Primary Source : TED TALK