Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease In Still Alice

Still Alice is the story about a fifty-year-old, Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. We meet Alice right before she is diagnosed, when she is still traveling for conferences and teaching at Harvard. After experiencing various memory lapses and spatial disorientations, Alice finally goes to the doctor and through a series of tests; she is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Alice struggles with this truth for a while before she finally tells her husband, John, and later her three kids about her diagnosis. She later has to step down from her position at Harvard, and little by little she loses more and more of who she once was. By the end of the novel, Alice is no longer able to take care of herself on her own, so her
I knew it affects the memory and more often the elderly; however, I did not know that early on-set Alzheimer’s exists. Although a very small percentage (10% according to this novel) of patients with Alzheimer’s suffer from early-onset form, it seems to me as though this form is the worst of the two. The fact that it can present itself so early in someone’s life is truly sad and unfortunate. As we see with Alice, she was enjoying a successful career-which she had takes great pride in- and suddenly it was all gone. She is being suddenly told she was incapable of performing the duties of her job as a professor, that she can no longer travel to conferences, and that she is not even allowed to go on a run on her own. She is suddenly stripped away from her independence, and with that, of herself. Another unfortunate factor of this early-onset form is that often, patients are not diagnosed until after the disease has already progressed considerably. Often times, the symptoms are associated with menopause (like in Alice’s case) or simply with growing old, since this form usually emerges in patients under sixty-five years