DETECTING DEMENTIA

New science is uncovering how Alzheimer's could be detected decades before symptoms strike. Could it give us the head start needed to fight back and defeat the disease?

- ANTHEA ROWAN

I don't have to think very hard to remember when my mother's memory revealed the first tiniest clues that all was not well.

We were on the phone. I recounted a story of my best friend, Caroline.

"Who's Caroline?" she asked.

I had known Caroline since I was very young; she was a significant part of my life. And Mum's.

I told myself my mother's lapse was on account of the dislocation that comes with a conversation that isn't face-to-face. That my reference to Caroline was out of context.

That Mum wasn't concentrating.

That she was having a 'senior moment'. And then I tried to forget that Mum had ever forgotten Caroline at all.

That was 10 years before my mother died of Alzheimer's disease, the most common type of dementia. It accounts for up to 80 per cent of cases and is the slowest to develop which, perhaps paradoxically, might be to a person's advantage: it could mean that there's a window of opportunity to do something about the impact of this devastating disease that many people - including some doctors don't yet appreciate. According to Alzheimer's Disease International's 2024 World Alzheimer's Report, 65 per cent of health and care professionals believe dementia is a normal part of ageing and 80 per cent of the public do too (up from 66 per cent five years ago). But it's not.

Dementia might feel like a wrecking ball, but it's not simply absent one day and fully present the next. No, it settles in, makes itself at home and lingers in the shadows for 10, 15, or even 20 years.

Studies in the past have presented Alzheimer's as developing in several stages, but recent research has changed this picture. A team from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, claims the disease develops in only two distinct phases, or 'epochs'.