Glen Campbell Admits to Alzheimer Disease

I admit to a certain amount of celebrity voyeurism, just like most of you.  Leafing thru magazines while waiting in line in the grocery store and reading the same while in a professional office are my guilty pleasures.  But it gave me no pleasure to find out today that country music icon, Glen Campbell, just went public with his diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD).

Apparently he'd suffered from short-term memory loss for years.  As you know, memory loss that doesn't impact function is the sine qua non for mild cognitive impairment (MCI), approximately 50% of whom will go on to develop AD.  Currently, MCI is a clinical diagnosis as is AD.

As noted in an earlier post, we have recently defined pre-clinical AD whereby the patient is completely asymptomatic but carries biomarkers of disease.  Once we discover biomarkers with good accuracy and predictive value, it will help aid in research for a cure since we can then include just those patients w/AD and exclude those w/o AD from specific clinical trials.

These biomarkers will also help make the diagnosis more clear and aid in understanding the transition from MCI to AD (perhaps the reason that only 50% convert is that the other 50% don't have the appropriate biomarkers and are actually suffering from some other condition).  There's a nice commentary & review of this new concept in last week's JAMA.

My thoughts & prayers go out to Glen Campbell & his family at this time, as well as to all those who either suffer with/from this disease or care for someone who does.  In the meantime, let's do what we can to minimize our personal risk of falling prey to this disease.