VALLEY OF FORGETTING

The quest for a cure for Alzheimer’s in a perhaps unlikely venue.

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude detailed a number of genetic consequences of isolation, with hinterland families manifesting odd physical characteristics. The same isolation, Colombian researchers hypothesize, accounts for the pronounced presence of hereditary dementia there. As science writer Smith observes, there was the possibility that the Colombian countryside harbored “many potential triggers of dementia, including chemicals used in mining and agriculture.” Yet the fact that so many families had members with early-onset dementia, often setting in before age 50 and even younger, suggested a genetic cause—and one early discovery was that “every sick person had had a sick parent.” In a time of civil war and narco kings, medical research in Colombia was a fraught proposition, with investigators including one hero of the piece, a doctor named Francisco Lopera Restrepo, taking shelter abroad for a time as colleagues and students were kidnapped and murdered. When things calmed down, foreign scientists arrived to study the phenomenon alongside homegrown researchers, isolating genes and eventually helping establish clear patterns of inheritance—and, interestingly, also accumulating proof that trauma of some sort often proved a trigger in setting off a patient’s decline. Frustratingly, drugs used in extensive trials did not prove efficacious at first, though Big Pharma kept an eye open for the possibilities of a market in Colombia, “a common, and frequently criticized, practice among pharmaceutical firms working in the developing world: testing expensive therapies in poor populations, then passing the costs on to strapped healthcare systems.” The quest continues: As Smith writes in closing, the Colombian institute called Neurociencias has been an important pioneer in identifying numerous genetic mutations that may in time yield keys to treatment.

Solid medical reportage with a hopeful conclusion that science may soon bring a cure for a devastating disease.