Includes bibliographical references (pages [277]-299 and index (pages [301]-310).
Contents:
Making and remaking Alzheimer disease -- Striving to standardize Alzheimer disease -- Paths to Alzheimer prevention -- Embodied risk made visible -- Alzheimer genes: biomarkers of prediction and prevention -- Genome-wide association studies: back to the future -- Living with embodied omens -- Chance untamed and the return of fate -- Transcending entrenched tensions -- Portraits from the mind.
Summary:
Based on a careful study of the history of Alzheimer's disease and extensive in-depth interviews with clinicians, scientists, epidemiologists, geneticists, and others, Margaret Lock highlights the limitations and the dissent implicated in this approach. She stresses that one major difficulty is the well-documented absence of behavioral signs of Alzheimer's disease in a significant proportion of elderly individuals, even when Alzheimer neuropathology is present in their brains. This incongruity makes it difficult to distinguish between what counts as normal versus pathological and, further, makes it evident that social and biological processes contribute inseparably to aging. Lock argues that basic research must continue, but it should be complemented by a realistic public health approach available everywhere that will be more effective and more humane than one focused almost exclusively on an increasingly frenzied search for a cure.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.