A neurologist with Alzheimer’s disease

I am a retired neurologist with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. I took care of many patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias during the 25 years that I practiced general neurology in Portland, Oregon. I have written about my experiences with Alzheimer’s from my two perspectives, patient and physician, in a soon-to-be released book titled A Tattoo On My Brain: A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease. Tattoo will be released this May by Cambridge University Press. In this blog I will expand on the topics discussed in the book. We’ll talk about how Alzheimer’s disease starts to appear in the brain up to 20 years before cognitive problems start and why I think it is important to recognize and start to manage the disease before these memory issues start. I’ll explain what we know now about lifestyle modifications that can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, especially if they are started early. As important advances in Alzheimer’s research appear, I’ll do my best to vet them and bring you up to date on some of the most promising. I’ll also talk about my own experiences with Alzheimer’s. I won’t rehash too much of what is already in the book, but there are a lot of experiences that didn’t get mentioned, and there will be more to come.

These are tau-PET scans of my brain done in 2015 and 2018. The abnormal tau protein is found in the neurofibrillary tangles seen in Alzheimer’s disease. I’ll go into more detail about amyloid- and tau-PET scans in a later post. (Courtesy of Dr. Gil Rabinovici, UCSF Memory and Aging Center.)