Getting to the age where dementia is a worry

Is dementia hereditary?

I am 81 days from my 75th birthday and today I Googled that particular connection for the first time.

It just wasn’t something that had concerned me until today. Part of it might have been thinking it could never happen to me and part of it might have been the though that if I couldn’t be a child prodigy or a boy wonder anymore, at least I wouldn’t have early-onset Alzheimer’s or dying young to worry about.

After all, the lifespan of an average American male born in 1949 is 65.2 years. That means I’m already playing with house money.

But I always figured I had a better chance of dying after being shot by a disappointed office seeker, like President Garfield, or by an anarchist, like President McKinley. than I had of contracting dementia.

Garfield definitely got the short end of the stick. When Charles Guiteau shot him on July 2, 1881, he hadn’t even completed four months of his term. He didn’t die until Sept. 19th and actually seemed to be recovering at some point. But doctors couldn’t find the bullet and in fact searched for it with unsterilzired fingers and instruments.

The infection killed him and he was the one of the four assassinated presidents who could have been saved.

But once again …

We know, you wandered off from the point you were trying to make.

Yes and no. Yes, I wandered away from the point I was trying to make about dementia. No, because for the life of me, I could not come up with the word I use to describe that action.

You couldn’t remember “digress?“

Nope. The closest I could come up with was “diverge” until I looked back and found the last time I digressed.

Huh.

It’s not the first time. A couple of years ago, l I was in Walmart and an oldie by CCR was playing. I thought “Hey, that’s Creedence Clearwater …” I couldn’t remember what the “R” stood for. I swear, it took me 10 minutes till I remembered it was “Revival.”

But you digress again.

Uh, yeah.

I decided it would be a good thing to learn more about dementia because of something I heard.

My maternal grandfather had dementia when he died in 1985 and the age of 89, and my mother had it when she died in 2020 at the age of 93. Unfortunate, but hardly a longshot when you realized that reaching the age of 85 in America means you have a 50-50 chance at some sort of dementia.

But yesterday I heard that someone in my family — someone younger than me — had the beginnings of dementia. Suddenly I felt the desire for more information.

Is dementia hereditary?

As it turns out, most kinds of dementia are not passed down in families, but there are several to wich there is a genetic predisposition. Hunjtington’s disease and Familial Prion disease are two and neither runs in my family. The third is youth-onset Alzheimer’s and just as I’m too old ever to be a boy wonder, I’m way past the risk of youth-onset anything.

Still, just because it isn’t hereditary doesn’t mean I wasn’t concerned for my sibling. Thankfully, I learned that the news was the result of a mistaken diagnosis. So my generation of my family remains dementia-free and all five of us have outlived both presidents Garfield and McKinley.