emerging from lurking
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2019 2:27 pm
Hi folks,
A friend told me about this site about a year ago, and I've been stopping by occasionally, really excited (and sometimes overwhelmed) by all the resources available here. Thank you to everyone who has helped create and maintain this space.
I found out that I have apoe4/apoe4 alleles in 2015 when I took the Boston Heart Health test at my doctor's suggestion. We were actually trying to find out whether I had heart disease, and I wasn't warned that I was taking a test that would acquaint me with my genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease.
It was about the last thing I wanted to hear at the time. I had just separated myself from being my father's caregiver for much of 2013-2014 and set him up with caregivers in his home. I remember being told by his neurologist in 2014, he must have been a very intelligent man, because to look at the stroke damage and Alzheimer's shrinkage in his brain, she would not expect him to be doing nearly as well as he was. Funny how even the bright side from a neurologist can be profoundly depressing.
In the summer of 2016 many of you were at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, where Dale Bredesen presented his groundbreaking research on Alzheimer's. I didn't know anything about that conference, but was across town at the courthouse, where my siblings and I finally had to use the legal system to get power of attorney and medical decision making established for our father. He passed away in November 2016.
I had read Aging With Grace (published in 2001) several years previously, and was struck by author David Snowdon's advice that on an individual level (as opposed to for research in which subjects remain uninformed), testing for the apoe4 gene was not just useless but destructive, because it evoked such doom and gloom over a disease process that had no remedy.
I'm delighted to see that now there are researchers, like Bredesen, who are seeing signs of hope for preventing and even reversing Alzheimer's. No simple remedy, to be sure, but there is hope!
There are about a thousand (well, okay, maybe 20) things I'd like to share and ask you all about. But for today I'll ask about this one: I'm dealing with a large fibroid tumor. I'm in my early 50s and still cycling. I've seen a couple of things on line (sorry not going to excavate them right now) making the claim that women with apoe4 seem to have more problems with fibroids than other women. How do you evaluate this claim? It would perhaps make some sense, since the sex hormones are similar chemically to cholesterol, and perhaps (am I going out on a limb here?) also may not get cleared as effectively in women with apoe4. (Fibroid tumors grow in response to estrogen, particularly excessive estrogen.) Just wondering if any of you have dealt with this personally or read about it.
Thanks!
A friend told me about this site about a year ago, and I've been stopping by occasionally, really excited (and sometimes overwhelmed) by all the resources available here. Thank you to everyone who has helped create and maintain this space.
I found out that I have apoe4/apoe4 alleles in 2015 when I took the Boston Heart Health test at my doctor's suggestion. We were actually trying to find out whether I had heart disease, and I wasn't warned that I was taking a test that would acquaint me with my genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease.
It was about the last thing I wanted to hear at the time. I had just separated myself from being my father's caregiver for much of 2013-2014 and set him up with caregivers in his home. I remember being told by his neurologist in 2014, he must have been a very intelligent man, because to look at the stroke damage and Alzheimer's shrinkage in his brain, she would not expect him to be doing nearly as well as he was. Funny how even the bright side from a neurologist can be profoundly depressing.
In the summer of 2016 many of you were at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, where Dale Bredesen presented his groundbreaking research on Alzheimer's. I didn't know anything about that conference, but was across town at the courthouse, where my siblings and I finally had to use the legal system to get power of attorney and medical decision making established for our father. He passed away in November 2016.
I had read Aging With Grace (published in 2001) several years previously, and was struck by author David Snowdon's advice that on an individual level (as opposed to for research in which subjects remain uninformed), testing for the apoe4 gene was not just useless but destructive, because it evoked such doom and gloom over a disease process that had no remedy.
I'm delighted to see that now there are researchers, like Bredesen, who are seeing signs of hope for preventing and even reversing Alzheimer's. No simple remedy, to be sure, but there is hope!
There are about a thousand (well, okay, maybe 20) things I'd like to share and ask you all about. But for today I'll ask about this one: I'm dealing with a large fibroid tumor. I'm in my early 50s and still cycling. I've seen a couple of things on line (sorry not going to excavate them right now) making the claim that women with apoe4 seem to have more problems with fibroids than other women. How do you evaluate this claim? It would perhaps make some sense, since the sex hormones are similar chemically to cholesterol, and perhaps (am I going out on a limb here?) also may not get cleared as effectively in women with apoe4. (Fibroid tumors grow in response to estrogen, particularly excessive estrogen.) Just wondering if any of you have dealt with this personally or read about it.
Thanks!