header logo image

Alzheimer’s: Forestalling the Darkness with New Approaches (preview)

May 28th, 2010 8:21 am

In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude , Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health.

In a 21st-century parallel to the townspeople of Macondo, a few hundred residents from Medellín, Colombia, and nearby coffee-growing areas may get a chance to assist in the search for something akin to a real-life version of the gypsy’s concoction. Medellín and its environs are home to the world’s largest contingent of individuals with a hereditary form of Alzheimer’s disease. Members of 25 extended families, with 5,000 members, develop early-onset Alzheimer’s, usually before the age of 50, if they harbor an aberrant version of a particular gene.

[More]

Add to digg
Add to StumbleUpon
Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Add to del.icio.us
Email this Article




Alzheimer - Macondo - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Health - Conditions and Diseases

Related Post

Comments are closed.


2024 © StemCell Therapy is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) Comments (RSS) | Violinesth by Patrick