Why So Much of What We Know About Dementia Has Changed

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Robert Kolker (0:45)

A little off switch goes off in your head when you hear that someone has dementia. You say, oh, well, that's awful. And they become almost less of a person. And I think that these people want to stay people for as long as they can.

Sanjay Gupta (1:04)

Welcome to Chasing Life. Today, journalist Robert Kolker is going to join us to talk about his new book.

It's called The Vanishing Family. Got to say, it's a pretty stunning medical mystery centered around a potential tipping point in dementia research and Alzheimer's research. First though, longtime producer and longtime friend. Longtime producer, even longer than friend.

SPEAKER_2 (1:25)

Yeah, that's fair.

Sanjay Gupta (1:26)

Ben Tinker, nice to see you. We remembered to bring you back.

Ben Tinker (1:30)

Yes. I think that bodes well for this episode.

Sanjay Gupta (1:35)

I'm glad we're talking about Alzheimer's dementia. As you know, I'm a brain guy. I've written a book about this. But I think we are really at this tipping point, as we're going to hear from Robert, in terms of what is happening with potential therapies for Alzheimer's dementia. For a long time, it seemed like there was nothing.

It was called the valley of death for researchers who were even thinking about starting to look into Alzheimer's disease. That's changing.

Ben Tinker (2:01)

Yeah. I think you were, as usual, out ahead of this with your book and got people started thinking about this. But I feel like every week, every month has had some major development in the Alzheimer's space recently, with new blood tests and new therapies and things going on. I don't know what has brought this about right in this moment, but it really feels like this is a now kind of story.

Sanjay Gupta (2:21)

Part of the reason I got into medicine was because of Alzheimer's dementia.

My grandfather, my mom's father developed this when I was 12 or 13 years old, and it was so jarring in a way because people always talk about the memory loss and things like that that are very associated with dementia. I was thinking about going to medicine at the time. I thought about cardiac surgery. I thought about being a cancer doc. All those things, I felt were very, very tangible. Like they're obviously, no one wants cancer, no one wants heart disease, but you sort of understood it. When it came to brain things, I think in part, some of the reason I was interested in this is because it was so inexplicable.

Ben Tinker (3:04)

You always seem to pick the hardest problems to try and solve.

Sanjay Gupta (3:07)

I felt like there was good job security in a field that we didn't fully understand yet.

Ben Tinker (3:11)

The heart, we've got to figure it out. Five more years, it'll be fine.

Sanjay Gupta (3:16)

Before we bring in Robert, this idea of where we are with brain research and some therapies for some of these neurodegenerative diseases. The way I've been thinking about it lately is that in the 1950s, the Framingham study came out which was about cardiac disease.

I think before that study really became widely known and adopted, the findings became adopted. I think there was a sense that either you're going to get heart disease or you're not.

And there's not much you can do about it, right? That's just the way it goes. And now I think fast forward 70 years later, 80 years later, and everyone sort of agrees these are modifiable risk factors. I can lower my blood pressure, I can address my cholesterol, exercise, eat right, all that. And it makes a difference, I believe that. Same thing with oncology. In the 90s, there weren't a lot of great therapies before the 1990s. There were some, but then there was all of a sudden this new sort of generation of drugs and immunotherapies and all these other things that came along. It's still a terrible disease. I don't want to minimize it, but it felt like there was a change that happened significantly.