Quotes About Alzheimer's

“The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.”

— Jim Harrison

“A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points of
its own history, is like a person with Alzheimer's. And that can be a
social disease of a most destructive nature.”

— S.M. Sigerson

“But Marisa already knew the answer and it was too late for recrimination. The chance of even a rational discussion of the problem was forever shut out of Mama's brain. A brutal bastard was steadily sucking the intelligence and the very life from the mother who had once been witty, wise and loving. The scourge had a name Marisa had come to equate with hell: Alzheimer's Disease.”

— Anna Jeffrey

“I read of a Buddhist teacher who developed Alzheimer's. He had retired from teaching because his memory was unreliable, but he made one exception for a reunion of his former students. When he walked onto the stage, he forgot everything, even where he was and why. However, he was a skilled Buddhist and he simply began sharing his feelings with the crowd. He said, "I am anxious. I feel stupid. I feel scared and dumb. I am worried that I am wasting everyone's time. I am fearful. I am embarrassing myself." After a few minutes of this, he remembered his talk and proceeded without apology. The students were deeply moved, not only by his wise teachings, but also by how he handled his failings.
There is a Buddhist saying, "No resistance, no demons.”

— Mary Pipher

“Love is blind, there was no doubt about it. In Tara's case it was also deaf, dumb, dyslexic, had a bad hip and the beginnings of Alzheimer's”

— Marian Keyes

“It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'”

— John O'Keefe

“There's no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don't meet people who want to get Alzheimer's disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.”

— Aubrey De Grey

“Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.”

— Anne Wojcicki

“All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose.”

— Bill Bryson

“Dementia is often regarded as an embarrassing condition that should be hushed up and not spoken about. But I feel passionately that more needs to be done to raise awareness, which is why I became an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society.”

— Kevin Whately

“Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, brain and spinal cord disorders, diabetes, cancer, at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research, diseases that touch every family in America and in the world.”

— Rosa DeLauro

“The type of Alzheimer's Dad has is rare - posterior cortical atrophy or PCA - and it affects his spatial awareness and the way he judges distance. His first symptoms were erratic typing and spelling, but to talk to him, you'd never know there was a problem.”

— Rhianna Pratchett

“I became demented overnight. Sudden onset is one factor that distinguishes my form of dementia from the more common form associated with Alzheimer's disease.”

— Floyd Skloot

“As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.”

— Laurie Graham

“If out of concern over cloning, the U.S. Congress succeeds in criminalizing embryonic stem-cell research that might bring treatments for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes - and Dr. Fukuyama lent his name to a petition that supported such laws - there would be real victims: present and future sufferers of those diseases.”

— Gregory Stock

“Alzheimer's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami.”

— Gregory Petsko

“As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer's disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer's disease. You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.”

— Gregory Petsko

“You get the health benefits of coffee up through about the first twenty-four ounces. It's the biggest source of antioxidants for Americans, and we think it helps prevent Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well.”

— Mehmet Oz

“In addition to relieving patient suffering, research is needed to help reduce the enormous economic and social burdens posed by chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, cancer, heart disease, and stroke.”

— Ike Skelton

“My mother was a dramatic and egocentric person, and she died before my father, who died of Alzheimer's disease. But I'd often thought, God, we were so lucky that was the order in which they died because she would have felt put upon.”

— Sue Miller

“You don't just wake up one day with dementia or Alzheimer's; these conditions are developmental. Even when a problem triggers the need to collect data, it's reviewed by a specialist and filed away. There's no central repository allowing information to be shared across a multitude of researchers worldwide.”

— Tan Le

“Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that.”

— Michael Greger

“Although there have been warnings that it was coming for years, the Alzheimer's epidemic is here now and millions more families will be touched by this progressive - and ultimately fatal - disease unless its course can be altered.”

— Jeanne Phillips

“With Alzheimer's patients, you have to be very careful what you say when you're looking at them over their bed. Because once in a while, they understand it.”

— Nancy Reagan

“The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.”

— David Suzuki

“Alzheimer's is a devastating disease. It was painful for me and my family to watch my grandfather deteriorate. We must find a cure for this horrible disease.”

— David Hyde Pierce

“This is why Alzheimer's is such a terrible disease: the body of the person you love is there, but they've gone - your husband is gone - and they become your child, and you have to look after them as you would a child.”

— Judy Parfitt

“Decades later I would look into my father's eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer's with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.”

— Patti Davis

“Competition got me off the farm and trained me to seek out challenges and to endure setbacks; and in combination with my faith, it sustains me now in my fight with Alzheimer's disease.”

— Pat Summitt

“Cholesterol - which you get from eating too much of the wrong kind of fat - doesn't just help clog arteries in the brain, it may also help to seed the amyloid plaques that riddle the brain tissue of Alzheimer's victims.”

— Michael Greger

“People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.”

— Amy Tan

“There is a version of Alzheimer's which is early onset Alzheimer's. And it's - it's horrible, because people do get it in their 50s and 60s. And it's terrible.”

— Patti Davis

“Alzheimer's is a horrible thing. Some people are naive about it. They think, 'Oh it's just your memory,' but my mother was in terrible pain. Your body closes down. She didn't know if she'd eaten or if she wanted to eat. She couldn't remember how to walk. Towards the end, she didn't know us. It came gradually, then it got worse.”

— Bonnie Tyler

“Some of my best friends are Venture Capitalists, but let's face it, a hamster with Alzheimer's could make those kind of numbers. It's great work if you can get it.”

— Scott Adams

“I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.”

— Terry Pratchett

“Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.”

— Leroy Hood

“It may act as an ancillary factor, but by itself, the mutation in tau doesn't give you Alzheimer's disease. This is not to say the tau is not very important. It may be important in propagating the disorder from one cell to another. But as a causal mechanism, the evidence is strongest for beta amyloid abnormalities.”

— Eric Kandel

“We've had numerous people diagnosed with Alzheimer's who got better; they just come out of it; they are leading normal lives today. And then, of course, what the doctors say is it's not Alzheimer's. You run into that Catch-22 all the time. They say, well, it was probably just a temporary premature dementia, and they write-off the recovery to preserve their ignorance.”

— Richard M. Schulze

“You know, people get frustrated because their loved ones who have Alzheimer's, oh, he doesn't recognize me anymore, how can I recognize this person, if they don't recognize me? They're not the same person. Well, they are the same person, but they've got a brain disease. And it's not their fault they've got this disease.”

— Ron Reagan

“The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now (Alzheimer's Syndrome). Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's - these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people.”

— Ron Reagan

“Alzheimer's disease is death before death, and I'm terrified of it.”

— Joey Comeau

“Courage has become Raiders of the Lost Ark, or riding in spaceships, killing people, taking enormous physical risks. To me, the kind of courage that's really interesting is someone whose spouse has Alzheimer's and yet manages to wake up every morning and be cheerful with that person and respectful of that person and find things to enjoy even though their day is very, very difficult. That kind of courage is really undervalued in our culture.”

— Mary Pipher

“Jewish Alzheimer's is forgetting everything except a grudge.”

— Maureen Lipman

“I often hear people say that a person suffering from Alzheimer's is not the person they knew. I wonder to myself - Who are they then?”

— Bob DeMarco

“I am saddened when I hear these words -this is not the person I knew - because those words objectify the person suffering from Alzheimer's. When you objectify a person you also dehumanize them. Once dehumanized the person becomes a villain.”

— Bob DeMarco

“Irish Alzheimer's: you forget everything except the grudges”

— Judy Collins

“Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer's patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn't matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery.”

— James Bovard

“It is leashed. Now drop the subject or I'll tell Sin you've seen me naked. (Kat) I will never bring this topic up again. Oh wait. What topic? I have Alzheimer's. I know nothing at all. (Kish)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders
Parkinson's and Alzheimer's
because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.”

— Oliver Sacks

“There are so many places, particularly right now. Go and volunteer at a food bank. If you play the piano, go play the piano in an Alzheimer's home. Or read in an Alzheimer's home. Help a military family with babysitting. The opportunities are endless. People often think 'They want me?' or 'I can be of help?' What we try to say here is 'Be who you are.'Feel that, live it and pass it on.”

— Maria Shriver