Word: snowdon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When University of Kentucky epidemiologist David Snowdon makes an important discovery, he doesn't break the news at a scientific meeting or even in a peer-reviewed journal. First he tells the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a group of Roman Catholic nuns who have given their bodies--and, after death, their brains--to help Snowdon study the slow mental wasting known as Alzheimer's disease...
...nuns and their carefully preserved brains have proved to be an Alzheimer's research treasure. From it, Snowdon has already found that tiny strokes may be the switch that flips a mildly deteriorating brain into full-fledged dementia and, bizarrely, that the density of ideas in the writings of a 20-year-old novice may be, for reasons nobody can fathom, a predictor of Alzheimer's at age 80. But in nine years of study, Snowdon has never been able to identify anything that might prevent the disease...
Until now. Snowdon's latest discovery, which he will present at the National Institutes of Health this week but which he first revealed at congregation headquarters in Rome last fall, shows a strong relationship between the severe brain atrophy of Alzheimer's disease and low levels of the common B vitamin known as folic acid, or folate. Furthermore, nuns with the highest levels of folate suffered the lowest levels of cognitive decline. Says Charles Halsted, professor of internal medicine at the University of California at Davis: "It's pretty exciting stuff...
...While Snowdon's study was small, involving only 30 individuals, the statistical relationship was unusually powerful. Moreover, it follows a similar finding made by researchers in England last year. "It's a remarkable confirmation in an entirely different population," says David Smith, director of Oxford University's Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing...
...enormous service. But they're not yet finished with their work. Long-term epidemiological studies, like fine wines, improve with age, and thus new findings from the Nun Study can be expected to enrich medical knowledge for many years to come. Indeed, long after he and his colleagues retire, Snowdon imagines, nuns like Sister Mary will continue to enlighten Alzheimer's researchers. This, of course, is the point. "These women were teachers all their lives," says Snowdon, "and now they've found a way to continue teaching after their deaths...