Word: snowdon
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...when Sister Mary died--in 1995, three months short of her 102nd birthday--an autopsy of her brain revealed a startling secret. Everywhere Snowdon and his colleagues looked, they saw signs of devastation, from microscopic plaques and tangles to gaping holes where millions of brain cells had died. Sister Mary, they realized, had been living with an advanced case of Alzheimer's disease--so advanced, says Snowdon, that it was hard to understand how she could have conducted herself with such clarity and coherence...
Gradually Snowdon and his colleagues began to understand that Sister Mary was not unique. Out of a group of 61 deceased nuns whose brains showed clear signs of Alzheimer's disease, a large fraction, 19 in all, seemed to have escaped the confusion and memory loss that make this form of dementia so devastating. The reason? As Snowdon and his team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week, these nuns, unlike their counter-parts whose symptoms were severe, had not suffered from strokes--particularly the small strokes so commonplace in the elderly. Only...
...link between stroke and dementia is not new, but seldom has it been called out so clearly. One reason is that Snowdon and his team had access to a sizable control group and thus were able to compare brain tissue of normal people with that of diseased individuals. In 41 nuns who did not have Alzheimer's-like brains, researchers found, strokes caused no measurable decrease in overall mental competence. But in nuns with Alzheimer's, just one or two strokes--small strokes that left swirls of dead tissue no bigger than a pencil tip--were enough to trigger...
Like many medical researchers, Snowdon has cultivated an affectionate, intensely personal relationship with his subjects, all members of a Roman Catholic religious order, the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Before his group publishes a new paper, Snowdon carefully makes the rounds of all the convents to make sure the sisters hear the news first. About a month ago, for example, he stopped by the rambling brick convent in Mankato, Minnesota, which serves as the headquarters for one of the order's seven U.S. provinces. "You've got to be good friends before you ask somebody for their brain," he jokes...
...Snowdon launched the Nun Study in 1986 as a way to take a broad look at the physical and psychological aspects of aging. But in 1990 he decided to narrow the focus to Alzheimer's. That's when he approached the order's U.S. leaders with a sensitive question. Would the nuns be willing to do more than take psychological tests and give blood samples? he wondered. Would they be willing to donate their brains? Like a politician campaigning for votes, Snowdon traveled from one convent to the next, making his pitch. In Baltimore, Maryland, he remembers, Sister Mary...