When you come right down to it, it isn’t the wrinkles that scare us the most. The sagging breasts, the pouchy belly, the complexion that has gone from poreless to rough and freckled. When I say “us”, I of course mean “me”–but I’d wager that this is the thing that gets almost everyone as we face aging, no matter what decade we’re now in. That disease or condition or whateveryouwanttocallit that we hide from and ignore and yet worry about each time we misplace our keys or forget the name of the kid next door or on the occasion when we actually come in contact with Someone Who Has It.

Alzheimer’s Disease. Dementia. OldTimers Disease. Losing Your Marbles, as the elders in my family call it. It is silent and it is insidious and if it’s going to strike you, by god it will. Not a damn thing you can do about it–except get your affairs in order and prepare your family for what can be a lengthy period caretaking you.

Typically, the programs that highlight Alzheimer’s Disease focus on the life that was lost (she was a judge…he was a scientist) and on the terrible burden the caretaker bears. Because, after all, what more is there to say. They certainly haven’t found a cure for it and most of their efforts to do so seem to end up in the dead letter laboratory.

Except–there is now a switch in thinking about Alzheimer’s. Forget a cure; let’s find a way to prevent it. Iron lungs certainly helped polio victims to live longer lives, but the Salk and Sabin vaccines eradicated the disease forever. That’s the thinking that is now moving some in the Alzheimer’s community to focus on prevention.

To that end, they created the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative, which is aimed at securing the attention and funding that  large-scale medical research studies demand. However, the recruitment of subjects to participate in such studies is challenging, to say the least. For one, the obvious, subjects would have to be considered free of the disease to participate in research on prevention. That’s difficult enough in a culture where it is erroneously assumed that one must be ill to take part in clinical trials. Added to that is the ostrich in the sand effect with which most of us face fading in our later years.

Thus, the first step in the research into prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease is amassing a large enough pool of people not suffering from the disease to be available to the researchers across the country looking at prevention. In order to provide this database of willing and eligible potential subjects, theAlzheimer’s Prevention Registry, coordinated by the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix, was born. Since it’s necessary to screen ten to twenty times the number of people needed to actually enroll for a trial, the Registry is aiming at enlisting some 250,000 people who have in some way been affected by Alzheimer’s.

If you number yourself among those so affected, if you were touched in any way by the disease, then you’re a good candidate for the Registry. The Registry is an online community which will offer education and advocacy as well as connecting members to applicable clinical trials. Your age doesn’t really matter; your relationship to Alzheimer’s doesn’t matter either. What does is that you want to take part in some way in finding a way to stop this devastating disease. You can find out more about it here. The mind you save may be, well, your own. 

This post was sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative. The Banner Alzheimer’s Institute is a nonprofit organization, but I was compensated for this post.