9 tips on avoiding Alzheimer’s and where to turn when a loved one suffers
- Angry at the quality of Alzheimer’s information available online after her mother was diagnosed, Deborah Kan set up her own website, Being Patient
- Exercise, meditation and laughter among the website’s tips for keeping the brain healthy into old age
Deborah Kan was an executive producer with The Wall Street Journal when she got the agonising news that her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – a progressive disease with no cure, with symptoms of memory loss and cognitive degeneration that gradually worsen.
In search of answers to her many questions, Kan turned to the internet, but that left her more frustrated. While she found a lot of information online, it was in bits and pieces, hard to understand and often contradictory.
“I didn’t know who or what to believe,” says Kan, who has lived in Hong Kong since 2004.
“I had so many questions but there was no one place where I could get the answers. Dealing with a long-term illness in the family is difficult enough. Not knowing where to turn to get accurate information makes it even more tormenting.”
Putting her journalistic skills to use, she mapped the pathology of Alzheimer’s and then called researchers, doctors and caregivers to probe them on the disease.
“Over an eight-month period I did over a hundred interviews and got a wealth of information that wasn’t readily available anywhere else,” says Kan, adding she was “angry at the injustice that this type of information wasn’t available to the millions impacted by Alzheimer’s”.