New evidence suggests dementia is affected by the aging heart muscle - Ockham's Razor - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
like diseases caused by toxic proteins or invading organisms and
more like a natural condition of aging. Professor Jonathan Stone takes a look at how your heart is probably killing you, one beat at a time.
The beat of our heart is symbolic of life, of energy, of courage and
determination. Yet scientists are beginning to take seriously evidence
that if we live to old age, the heart destroys us.
It does so in a terrible way, pummelling the brain beat after beat until its small
blood vessels burst, and lesions, tens of thousands of them, erode its
circuitry, until the brain shrinks around the debris, its function
failing. Slowly, relentlessly—this evidence suggests—the beat of the
heart destroys the memory, the intellect and the personality of the
person it had so long served to keep alive.
For scientists working on dementia, this is a challenging
statement. Many workers in the field still accept—or at least hope—that
the cause of age-related dementia, of Alzheimer’s disease, will be less
inevitable, less grounded in the unchangeable nature of our organs; that
dementia will be a treatable disease, not a fate; that it is caused by a
toxic protein or an invading organism, something you can design a drug
against, or a vaccine; something you can face square-on and overcome.
- Monday 2 February 2015 4:38PM
- Professor Jonathan Stone
like diseases caused by toxic proteins or invading organisms and
more like a natural condition of aging. Professor Jonathan Stone takes a look at how your heart is probably killing you, one beat at a time.
The beat of our heart is symbolic of life, of energy, of courage and
determination. Yet scientists are beginning to take seriously evidence
that if we live to old age, the heart destroys us.
It does so in a terrible way, pummelling the brain beat after beat until its small
blood vessels burst, and lesions, tens of thousands of them, erode its
circuitry, until the brain shrinks around the debris, its function
failing. Slowly, relentlessly—this evidence suggests—the beat of the
heart destroys the memory, the intellect and the personality of the
person it had so long served to keep alive.
If this understanding of dementia is correct, then a previously
unsuspected determinant of longevity has been identified—the beat of
the heart into a stiffening aorta limits our life by destroying the
brain and, incidentally, another very vascular and vital organ, the
kidney.
statement. Many workers in the field still accept—or at least hope—that
the cause of age-related dementia, of Alzheimer’s disease, will be less
inevitable, less grounded in the unchangeable nature of our organs; that
dementia will be a treatable disease, not a fate; that it is caused by a
toxic protein or an invading organism, something you can design a drug
against, or a vaccine; something you can face square-on and overcome.
