Today in a region of Colombia called Antioquia

Alzheimer’s Laboratory

Nobel prize winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote of a mythical town in the middle of the jungle whose residents suffer from a canadian goose jacket mysterious affliction that erases their memories. Today in a region of Colombia called Antioquia, reality appears to be imitating Canada Goose sale fiction in a way that may answer questions for all of us.

As we first reported last fall, Antioquia is home to the largest concentration in the world of people who carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them 100 percent certain to develop Alzheimer’s disease. And as devastating as Alzheimer’s is anywhere, this is a particularly cruel version it strikes when canada goose store people are in their mid 40s and leads to death about a decade later. It is a tragic situation, but a perfect scientific laboratory. And it’s now the center of a multimillion canada goose clearance dollar, NIH backed study trying to find out for the first time whether Alzheimer’s disease may be Canada Goose Coats On Sale preventable.

These are the Andes Mountains and lush countryside of Antioquia, Colombia, whose capital city, Medellin was once famous for murder and the drug cartel of Pablo Escobar. Today Medellin or «Medejin» as it’s pronounced here is peaceful. But for some families here, there’s still a battle Canada Goose online going on, a battle against an insidious disease. This family, mother Cecilia, her seven children, canada goose uk shop and grandchildren, lost its patriarch, uk canada goose outlet Alonso.

Freddie: For Canada Goose Online me, my father was number one.

Freddie, the oldest, remembers his dad always eager to join in and play with him and his friends.

Cecilia: He was a very joyful person. He loved to dance. He was a really nice person, a very good father, before the disease.

Lesley Stahl: When it first started, what were you noticing that made you think he’s he’s different?

Cecilia: He started asking, «What is the date today? Do I have to go to work?» And we got concerned.

Alonso at the time was in his Canada Goose Jackets mid 40s, so the memory loss and confusion made no sense. His doctor suggested exercise and vitamins, but Alonso just got worse forgetting the names of his children, getting lost and disoriented. His son buy canada goose jacket Victor had to help him get dressed.

Victor: I gave him his shirt, I told him «Dad, come, I’ll help you put your shirt on» and the first thing he did was to grab it and put it on through his buy canada goose jacket cheap feet.

Lesley Stahl: Did he understand what was happening to him?

Victor: There were moments of lucidity where he would ask me and say, «Son, what’s happening to me? Why don’t canada goose factory sale I remember? I don’t remember my children, or my wife. I don’t know who I am.»

His son Julio took him back to see the doctor:

Julio: When I asked the doctor I told him «Doctor, I am not leaving here » Sorry.

Dr. Francisco Lopera

Francisco Lopera: They were getting canada goose coats on sale disease very early in the life.

It all began many years earlier, back in the 1980s when Lopera was a young canada goose clearance sale medical resident. He had read about cheap canada goose uk small numbers of people scattered around the world who’d developed Alzheimer’s in their 40s. So when a 47 year old man canada goose coats came into his Medellin clinic with Alzheimer’s like symptoms, he was intrigued and decided to investigate.

Lesley Stahl: You met this one man and you decided to go to where he was https://www.arconserve.ca from?

Francisco Lopera: I decided to go to the town where he was living.

Lopera learned that the man’s father and grandfather had also lost their memories in their 40s. Then, a few years later, another similar patient came into the clinic, this time a 42 year old woman from a town 40 miles away. Dr. Lopera’s then nurse, Lucia Madrigal, asked if any of her relatives also started losing their memories when they were young.

Lucia: They told us yes, that the father, the uncles, the grandfather, the great grandfather, so I started making a little family tree, on one page, and I showed it to Dr. Lopera and I told him «Look what we have here. What cheap Canada Goose is this? So many with the Canada Goose Parka same disease so began a detective hunt that lasted more than a decade. Lopera and Madrigal traveled all Canada Goose Outlet over the region, finding more and more people afflicted with early onset Alzheimer’s and compiling family trees.

They thought it canada goose might be genetic, so Madrigal spent days at parish churches, poring over heavy ledgers where priests for generations had recorded canada goose uk outlet village births, marriages, and deaths. Thanks to these meticulous uk canada goose records, she was able to trace the disease back hundreds of years, and to make an important discovery the different families canada goose outlet nyc were actually one huge extended family, connected generations back by common ancestors who had died young, with an unusual cause of death written down by the priest: «softening of the brain.»

This is what «softening of the brain» looks like in real life. Fernando is 46 years old, a descendant canada goose uk black friday of that second patient years ago. He started forgetting things when he was in his late 30s, and now can no longer speak, feed himself, or do just about anything on his own. His aunt takes care of him round the clock just as she did with his mother when she got the disease at the same age.

Norelly is at an even later stage of the disease. Despite her appearance, she is just 58 years old. Patients were going from mild symptoms to complete dementia and then death within about a decade as Dr. Lopera showed us in these cognitive test results.

Francisco Lopera: You can see, at 38

Even at age 38, this man struggled as many older Alzheimer’s patients canada goose black friday sale do to copy a complex drawing accurately.