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t m c » p u l s e | a u g u s t 2 0 1 9 22 Judie took Kenny to Baylor College of Medicine, where doctors diagnosed him with mild Alzheimer's. Four years later, in 2017, his condition graduated to moderate Alzheimer's. "Most of the time, I understand, but I forget," Kenny said. "It comes and it goes." The faces and places that colored Kenny's memory are gradually fading. He's aware that his memory is slipping and that trying to hold onto his past is like trying to grip sand in his hand. Try as he might to cling to what's left, the sand will even- tually trickle between the cracks of his fingers until his hands are empty. "It makes me mad, frustrated, sad," Kenny said. "It makes me want to cry." Learning from failure Alzheimer's is named for Alois Alzheimer, a German psychia- trist and neuropathologist who, in 1906, was the first to identify the neurodegenerative disease in a 55-year-old woman named Auguste Deter. Alzheimer studied Deter in a Frankfurt psychi- atric facility for more than four years, until her death on April 8, 1906. He identified a host of unusual symptoms similar to dementia, including disorientation, loss of memory, unpredict- able behavior and trouble with language. After performing an autopsy, Alzheimer discovered high levels of a naturally-occurring protein in her brain. The clumps of amyloid plaques in Deter's cerebral cortex (the part of the brain that controls personality, motor function, language and information processing), along with tendrils of tau proteins that had became entangled, disrupted normal communication between neurons in her brain. Today, Alzheimer's disease is recognized as the most common form of dementia, although not everyone with dementia has Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's disease has pillaged the memories, emotions, experiences, personalities and—ultimately—identities of mil- lions of victims. To this day, it has no survivors. The Alzheimer's Association estimates that 5.8 million Americans are living with the disease; by 2050, this number is projected to reach nearly 14 million, with more baby boomers aging into a high risk of developing the disease. Because that risk increases with age, nearly one in two baby boomers who reach 85 will develop Alzheimer's. The disease progresses in three main stages: mild (early), moderate (middle) and severe (late). "The most common early presentation are things like dis- orientation, forgetting what day it is, repeating oneself, losing items within your home and not being able to retrace your steps," said Melissa Michelle Yu, M.D., associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease and Memory Disorders Center at Baylor College of Medicine. "There are normal things that happen with aging—we all forget our keys on the counter, those kinds of things—but … you go out the door without your keys and they're in the refrigerator, that's something different." More than a century after Alois Alzheimer characterized the disease, medical experts still don't know what exactly causes it, how to prevent it and—most significantly—how to treat it. In pursuit of a cure, Alzheimer's research has suffered scores of disappointments and dead ends. No drug exists to slow the progression of the disease. Instead, the Alzheimer's Kenny Tidwell walks up the stairs in his Kingwood, Texas, home.