IT'S over 20 years since I discovered I have the gene, APOE4, which has been linked to a raised risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Nearly a million people now have the disease in the UK and the number continues to rise - an estimated six million by 2050. Getting the news back then was scary.
There was no drug and nothing you could do to reduce the risk of what was clearly a horrible disease. But being a medical and health journalist, I felt that if the situation did change, I could find out about it. Now that I had skin in the game, I became very interested in Alzheimer’s.
Millions of pounds were being spent to develop a drug, but what interested me more over the next few years were reports of changes in diet and lifestyle that seemed to make a difference. They were odd, random things with little sense of why on earth they would work. But they turned out to be signposts to a much more hopeful future.
A doctor in Florida wrote about how giving coconut oil to her increasingly-demented husband produced a definite improvement. "I could tell he was getting better," she said, "because he started doing housework." Researchers at Minnesota University monitored several hundred nuns for years and found those who played mentally-challenging board games were less likely to develop thinking and memory problems.
But surely coconut oil in your breakfast porridge and a few rounds of Scrabble before bed weren't going to prevent brain cells from dying off? Well, there is growing evidence that.
