Word: dame
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...totally alert, eagerly anticipating the celebration of her 70th anniversary as a sister without the slightest sign of dementia. In a very real sense, this pair of retired schoolteachers haven't finished their teaching careers. Along with hundreds of other nuns in their order, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, they have joined a long-term study of Alzheimer's disease that could teach the rest of us how to escape the worst ravages of this heartbreaking illness...
Snowdon wasn't out to change the world when he first began visiting the convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minn. He wasn't even planning to study Alzheimer's disease. Snowdon was desperately trying to find a research project that would secure his position at the University of Minnesota. He was a young assistant professor of epidemiology at the time--a field he'd been introduced to as a young boy who raised chickens to earn money. "I learned a lot about what it takes to stay healthy from taking care...
...diagnose it: examine the patient's brain after he or she dies. If he were to proceed, Snowdon would need written permission to perform autopsies, not only on the Mankato nuns but also, to get a large enough sample, on members of the order at six other Notre Dame convents as well. "They really had to trust us," he says. "We could have turned out to be Dr. Frankensteins for all they knew...
Idea density turns out to be an astonishingly powerful predictor of Alzheimer's disease--at least among the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Snowdon found by reading nuns' early writings, he could predict, with 85% to 90% accuracy, which ones would show the brain damage typical of Alzheimer's disease about 60 years later. "When we first looked at the findings," says Snowdon, "we thought, 'Oh my God, it's in the bag by the time you're in your...
...panned out so well. It makes sense that antioxidants like vitamin E and vitamin C, which soak up cell-damaging "free-radical" molecules in the body, would protect against cell destruction. Although vitamin E looked promising in an earlier study, neither substance had an obvious effect on the Notre Dame sisters. Nor, on the other side of the equation, did mercury or aluminum in the diet, both of which had been implicated in earlier studies as possible triggers for Alzheimer...