Comment by danielscrubs
2 days ago
I hear quite a lot of these stories from my parents. Are these kind of personality shifting diseases, like Alzheimers becoming more common? And if so, is it because we take better care of our hearts and don’t die as early as?
Yes, I think that's right. The average age of death due to old age has climbed for over a century, probably due to greatly improved public health and personal medicine.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
Because dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases take decades to manifest they've been especially hard to diagnose early and prevent or treat early, while cognition is still intact. Alas, I think that hasn't changed much in recent years, despite many scientists and businesses working toward that end.
Partly that's because few academic researchers can pursue a theory long enough in time to fully assess its potential, especially in combo therapies. Nor can the big pharma corporations who not only suffer from the same difficulty in long-term funding, but prefer the ROI of continuing treatments for disease to that of quick cures (or lifestyle advice). These are nowhere near as profitable a pill the patient must take for decades.