Degrees and Dementia

We're still enjoying good family times with my brother Caleb's family having stayed several days after the big Miller reunion ended. Tonight Caleb told us a story about how one person explained to an inquiring farmer what various academic degrees stood for.

"Well, you already know what B.S. stands for. . . M.S. stands for More of the Same. Ph.D stands for Piled Higher and Deeper."

Caleb's wife Kara told us that when Caleb was awarded his Ph.D at Notre Dame, in a ceremony honoring the people who invested in the lives of the degree candidates, she was given a "Ph.T" (put hubbby through).

It's almost as much fun to see people poke fun at their own degrees as it is to observe when someone asks what the degree was for and they can't remember. I've witnessed both.

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Two years ago, at the Miller reunion, my aunt Ann told me that her husband, my uncle Dan, had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. They had begun making preparations to move from Ohio to Virginia to a facility where they could transition into higher levels of care as it became necessary. They were here again this year, traveling by car from Virginia, and Dan looks well, but the disease is obviously taking its toll on his memory.

One of the things that surprised me about Dan is how self-aware he is about his condition. When he has difficulty remembering something, he makes perfectly rational explanations about why. "I have Alzheimer's," he might say, "and I can't recall that anymore." Or "I remember that we lived there, but I can't tell you how long. Ann could tell you that." Yet he listened very knowingly to Sunday's sermon, and seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.

Caleb told us tonight that he's heard that there is an inverse relationship between people with advanced degrees and Alzheimer's. That is, people with advanced degrees often do not get Alzheimer's as quickly as others do. Often, however, if a more highly educated individual does get Alzheimer's, his condition deteriorates very fast. Some people believe that the more highly educated individuals simply have mastered a bigger set of compensation strategies to offset the visible symptoms of an Alzheimer's-affected brain. But eventually the compensations fail to be adequate, and by then the brain abnormalities are fairly advanced and disabling.

My 83-year-old identical twin uncles seem like a case in point. The one with Alzheimer's was a farmer. His school-administrator, M.S.-degreed twin is still very cogent. But of course there were other differences in how they lived their lives. The farmer was exposed to many agricultural chemicals over his lifetime. The school administrator always ate healthfully while his twin had at least one bowl of ice cream almost every day. (He was never the slightest bit overweight, however.) In talking about this tonight, we all realized that it's easy to over-generalize, but interesting nevertheless to note whether or not the people you know fit the patterns other people suggest may be present.

Dan, however, who is in his mid-seventies, also has an M.S. I don't know anything about how he ate, but he certainly was not often exposed to agricultural chemicals. He was a high school teacher and later, counselor. Neither the dairyman brother just older than he, or the retired principal brother just younger than he in the family have Alzheimer's. So the proposed theory about the relationship between advanced degrees and Alzheimer's does not hold up at all in Dan's case.

The moral is that none of us can predict with any certainty what our old age will be like, and we all need to practice now to receive the grace of God for each day. We will certainly need it then, whether or not there's dementia in our future.